skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Presumably there's concern about what happens to someone in the middle if they lose balance, drop something, etc. and either they or those behind them have nothing to hold onto to steady themselves. Some of the escalators on the Underground are long, and you could hurt an awful lot of people if someone fell near the top.
I'm an escalator walker myself but not everyone is physically able to walk up or down a very large set of a stairs. Just because someone can not do that doesn't mean we ought to design things to exclude them.
One thing the article doesn't analyze at all: standing on both sides improves total throughput, but how does it affect the individual latency for people walking up the left side? If the answer is "it's faster for them too", then tell people that and they'll be more inclined to go along with it. And if the answer is "it's slower for them", then no wonder they don't want to go along with it.
Doing this kind of science is so easy. Do the experiment, film the whole thing, leave the footage untouched, point to the timestamp where stuff happens, and voila, repeat the experiment and everyone will try to reproduce it.

Instead of providing anecdotal evidence, fabricated data, and being a scientist that spends time on saying that radiation from mobile technologies is harmful, despite microwaves you use to heat up your food irradiating you more in that frequency range, or sun, blasting you with even more radiation.

It's so easy to be a scientist, especially if you have government funding like the authors do. But for some reason, they decide to spend their entire lives doing nothing of quality, doing nothing meaningful.

Yes, we people invented terms like consciousness, self-awareness, intelligent behavior. Yes, these things are used to put stuff on a scale when they shouldn't be (if we agree that the evidence for theory of evolution is convincing), and that is not good, and yes I do understand the motivation of the authors. But really, doing good science, especially for these types of things is not really hard.
Reversal of hair greying following adipose mesenchymal stem cell transplantation
Well, differently from you and your friend, ISIS does have somebody out to get them.

It's very hard to think someone would get to the trouble of creating and using a secure chat application, but then fail to secure its distribution.
<sarcasm>
hahaha I love it. Better yet:

Do your roads support horses?

Many people own horses in America still[0]

Have they got to the destination yet?

FACT: All people who are not traveling, are not traveling by horseback. --socrates

If you're on a highway and suddenly the edgecase of therebeing a fuckton of cars going fast on it occurs, suddenly they have to swerve to avoid a random cowboy and get in an accident, then they don't make it to their destination.

Do your interstate or inter-province highways prevent horses? Loads of them do[1]

You wouldn't download a car[2]?
</sarcasm>
==================================

Look, I get it, provide a good user experience. That's fine, I appreciate that. However, javascript is pretty ubiquitous, so what the fuck are people supposed to do? Check headers and sniff browser on every request (something the parent article implied was negative), then send 2 sets of javascript to the user, one to call a cdn, and one to call a local script if download fails or cdn not cached? Check if cdn is cached every time?

I mean, sure there is some pretty good practices out there and you should be cognizant of that, but if you are just sending out a cat picture because you're a bored 16 year old kid learning how to use a new web technology like webgl, are we supposed to hold you to 5 9's worth of uptime and backwords compatability all the way to mosaic.

Here is the answer (my answer really) you can do whatever the fuck you want, to the extent that wtfyw overlaps with what your users want, you can keep them.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horses_in_the_United_States

A USDA census in 1959 showed the horse population had dropped to 4.5 million. Numbers began to rebound somewhat, and by 1968 there were about 7 million horses, mostly used for riding. In 2005, there were about 9 million horses.

[1]http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pub...

[2]http://www.slideshare.net/arnoudengelfriet/you-wouldnt-downl...
it certainly applies to bicycles in orbit.
It's not possible to walk up them for a lot of people (health reasons). Even fit people have trouble in some stations as the escalators can be very steep and very long.
You can't possibly be serious.
How do escalators accommodate people in wheelchairs? I find it hard to believe they don't have elevators for disabled people.
I said "WHEN our driverless cars head underground". I did not say all the travel would be underground.

Small single passenger vehicles can also pass each a lot more easily in the amount of space a train takes up. You could have two levels in the amount of vertical space a train takes up.

I also don't think a train takes up less of the available space and time than individual cars would, when has to stop at all the stops. All other trains must wait too. The flow is constantly interrupted.

Robotic underground construction is also going to be a lot cheaper.

Whatever happens and whatever the mix between walking and vehicle transportation evolves, people are going to prefer to travel in their own vehicles over being crammed into cars with strangers and having to navigate escalators.

This particular system is shaped by the current technological constraints, not so much by people's desires. When technology advances, it will eventually change.
Elaborate honeypot operation?
I don't think your line of thinking makes sense. Escalators already account for varying widths of people. But on average, two people of varying widths can fit on an escalator. Just make the escalators more narrow so that, on average, only one person fits on the escalator.
Not to mention all the self-quotes inviting you to tweet them out. Sorry, but this article is drivel. It fails to mention the third choice: don't do the routine and don't burn the money.
Amazon to add sales tax to Colorado purchases
Earth X-ray
PASTOR LAPHROAIG AND HIS MERRY BAND OF REVERSE ENGINEERS LIFT THE WELDED HOOD [pdf]
This is similar to one of the most effective techniques I have for decision making. I send an eMail to the people or person who holds the responsibility, stating "I'm going to carry out this action tomorrow; <describe decision I've made and action I'm taking>. This is your chance to stop me."

It is fantastically effective.
Where does the article say this is an encrypted chat app? The description of the app says that it features news and videos, and the only discussion of chat that I can find is about using third-party encrypted services like Telegram (which gets three separate mentions) to communicate.
Yea I'm worried about this guy. Remember how Aaron Schwartz couldn't request help because it was against the law to do so?
Rad! Throw some sentiment analysis on that corpus and let your classmates know how they feel!
How to Be a Good or Bad Interviewer
That article smells fishy as hell. And if Alzheimer's were treatable, today, it would be a huge huge deal, not something being peddled around as a miracle cure on the basis of a 10-person "study".

They're making progress though. They've found at least one candidate drug that appears to clear up the Amyloid-beta plaques in mice.

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/151208/ncomms9997/full/nco...
That depends very much on the design. Remember that at any given time, most of the tunnel in the Underground is empty. Most of the time you're waiting in stations is because other people are getting on or off, not you or your own party. And most of the stations you stop at (and travel slower before and after) aren't relevant to your own journey.

A network of high speed paths with efficient out-of-path access for starting and ending journeys could in principle offer dramatically higher throughput than current mass transit on the Underground, even with individuals or small groups sharing private vehicles. The trouble is that the amount of time and money required to build that network underground would be staggering even under ideal conditions, and conditions under London are very far from ideal.
There is an unfortunate side effect of the rationalism movement that the (mostly correct) dismissal of religious explanations and pseudoscientific ideas: A lot of people who should know better also dismiss philosophy, conjecture and other ideas that don't have a firmly established theory as unscientific. These things are an important part of the scientific process. A lot of the key scientific tools and knowledge we have today started out as philosophical riddles.

Ironically, this same mistake has been made time and time again throughout history when science has made great strides. Someone points out that "that's funny", and are immediately shot down for coming up with ridiculous ideas that are not supported by the current theories.

This might not describe OP, but it's a pretty common phenomenon that often shows up in discussions where the boundaries of our current scientific knowledge are close. E.g. AI, the un-observable part of the universe, experiments that seem to break physics (e.g. the RF resonant cavity thruster), what is consciousness, etc.
OK, so the author purports to be on the side of "end users". And he purports to share empathy with users who get annoying messages that their browser is lacking, outdated, etc.

As an "end user" who has gotten hundreds of such messages over the years, I ask: How about Silverlight? Have you ever gotten an annoying message along the lines of "Sorry, you need Silverlight"?

I have. And I assure you I do not need Silverlight to watch video.

Speaking of empathy, just this week I believe someone posted to HN about a still undisclosed 0-day for Silverlight that someone wrote years ago, that still works flawlessly and recently sold for tens of thousands of US dollars on the black market.
They could have the ALL STAND rule for some stations, ALL WALK for others.

Since the government is willing to FORCE people to things they don't want effectively breaking a COMMON RULE OF THE TRADITION they shouldn't bother being reasonable.

Perhaps they should also set optimal speeds and force people to comply. Wait, that's what they're doing!
You must like Descartes.

Though I think what you're saying is actually that everything should be questioned, as your sentence appears to change its meaning halfway through. ("While I'm not a Holocaust denier, I do believe everything can in principle be questioned, including our most sacred beliefs, or especially those - and perpetually reaffirmed.")

Holocaust denial is not a "fundamentally new idea," it's a fundamentally false idea. You don't need to question and perpetually reaffirm facts. It's simply not a matter of opinion whether or not the holocaust occurred.
If you breach your self-contract by not burning the money, you then have to burn $200!
Mr. Wright claims that these megastructures don't make sense with our technology, but perhaps even for these very advanced aliens this is not easy? Perhaps these are their pyramids?
They may well be tossing immeasurable robotic efforts or genetically modified biological suffering at building these megastructures.

It's worth considering that this is something extraordinary even for this civilization that is far more advanced than we are. Rather than a hum-ho project for an extremely advanced species (or sentient AI).

This is probably a pyramid-scale project.
The math is the article is a little sketchy. "But a 2002 study of escalator capacity on the Underground found that on machines such as those at Holborn, with a vertical height of 24 metres, only 40% would even contemplate it. By encouraging their preference, TfL effectively halves the capacity of the escalator in question, and creates significantly more crowding below, slowing everyone down. "
It doesn't make sense that this would "halve the capacity" unless no one was walking. It seems that with a 40% stated preference for walking, it would be only a 10% loss of capacity due to preference differences. The description should really also include a description of how fast walking is compared to standing. Elevators move at around 0.3 m/s, people walk at about 4x that pace, so even doubling the spacing requirements would shave a fair bit off of that.

I think this result is a due to it only being tried on one of three up escalators. By the assumption that there are 6 lanes, devoting 1/3 to walkers and 2/3 to standers can lead to greater efficiency if that more closely matches the actual preference distribution. By maintaining choice, and matching the available options to those desired by passengers one can optimize the results for both those who prefer speed and those who prefer not expending energy.
>maybe go in the future

Go is not going to replace Java in the future. For a language which cannot even lock dependencies to a version, people sure like to pretend it is the holy grail because Google made it.
What do you think of a game application as a challenge?
you play with people you know or not, and if you win, he must pay you and if you lose, you have to pay people pay on the system, both amounts are blocked until that one of those wins. The person who won the sum will be refunded and the one that has lost its sum will be paid automatically to the other player.
I've lived in good areas and bad areas, and the police act very differently in each of those areas. So my impression is that, in both situations, the police are responding largely in reasonable ways to their environments.

So I believe that the ultimate fix to the "policing problem" is 1) Fix the economy so that most crime is no longer motivated and 2) Reinforce community values so that people don't feel so alienated from their community.

Of course, there will still be some crime - but it will be a relatively small amount.
The current proposal (stand on both sides) assumes everybody is capable of standing on an escalator. I, for one, am not. I get vertigo, I get mad, I get sad. My body doesn't handle being stuck deep below the surface for very long times, so I must walk up. I usually don't do very long underground trips because of that condition.
Even fit people have trouble in some stations as the escalators can be very steep and very long.

Also, the ambient temperature and other atmospheric properties are far from ideal for physical exertion in many of these stations.

That doesn't matter so much if you're generally fit and completely healthy. If, however, you have something like asthma, the environment potentially exacerbates the condition even if you're otherwise in good shape for that kind of exercise.
Because political partisan trolls went through and downvoted everything I said on this subject. Happens every time. :(
They don't. Only certain stations have lifts and not even all of those have level access from lift to platform.
It was part of the same ad campaign (I remember it):

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/71/201509778_6f81b468ac.jpg
Meanwhile, I'll seat here, wishing for an update that won't make the editor eat almost 2GB of RAM after opening 3 text files :(
I call it: if you're developing WP themes, you are in business
It seems you jumped from 40% even contemplating walking to a 40% stated preference during your reasoning there. The latter is quite a different thing and probably explains a lot of the discrepancies.
Yes, stairs. I use stairs everywhere. However, some places don't have stairs. It seems the public transit infrastructure doesn't think there are people who can and want to walk in the cities nowadays.
Brain fart time: how about a transit system composed entirely of escalators ? When you board, you take a slow treadmill that runs in parallel to a faster one, and that in turn to another, gaining 0.3-0.6 meters/second on each lateral skip. You do the reverse when approaching your destination.

An treadmill running at 10m/s with pairs of people spaced at 0.5m has a capacity of 40 people/second, or 2400 people per minute, or one large train every 30 seconds. The average speed is higher and you no longer need to wait for a train. The only very small problem is the prohibitive cost with existing tech.
Ask HN: Which language to use for text analysis?
I'm looking to find out if there is a commonly used programming language to do text analysis?

I know Python is popular and I've used it before. I just want to see what peoples opinions are.
Have you ever been on a singlewide escalator? They have both single and double in my city. Rider comfort does not scale down linearly. It's the same story on roads, a two lane highway is going to be much wider than half the width of a four lane highway.
Where can I join freshStart?
My understanding might be wrong, but I believe during the 2013 Cyprus bail-in, all Cypriot depositors had money missing from their bank accounts: they lost 9.9% of funds above the insurance ceiling, 6.75% of funds below the ceiling:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2013/03/cyprus-bai...
It's usually foolish to 2nd guess a plane crash if you weren't the pilot
Many people find it valuable to be able to buy a home right away, rather than saving up for 20 years.

Much of the modern world is impossible without financial instruments that let corporations borrow hundreds of millions of dollars. Airlines, for instance.

So I do not think bankers do nothing of value.
And to your point, if you have a site that doen't really rely on JS, sure you can throw some no-js classes in and get the lowest hanging fruit, but what then?

I mean, don't you usually check if something succeeded by using javascript? You have to send them the script to see if it fails. Then, sure don't show them the button, obviously your button and the communication with your entire backend is pretty unimportant, just show them the "browse happy your using a strong outdated browser" text.

I think it was Brian Chesky, or maybe Steve Jobs, who talked about how the difference between being successful was having a site that didn't work for 3% of users vs. having a site that didn't work for 3% or users but you didn't show them a button.
I run it on a Macbook Pro. Admittedly I have 16 GB of RAM but it runs great!
However people stand on adjacent steps, but allow much more space around walkers, which is where most of the capacity loss is.
Misht: A Community of Software Engineers
That's interesting. Perhaps there is some "natural" process that's producing dust clouds.
Oh, absolutely wacky.
What made you pick the name Txtter (Text being the key part) for an app that sends photos?
You and 0.0001% of the other users.

That will probably not exceed a total revenue of more than a couple dollars, so I guess I can get over that much quicker than you can find another site that does the same but works without Javascript.

But then I am a game dev, it is basically impossible to make an HTML game work without javascript and it is certainly not worth the investment.

Javascript is here to stay. You don't have to run it, but if you expect that people care you will be disappointed.
https://www.worldwinner.com/
There's plenty of "burden of proof" to go around, I think. That's what makes this such an interesting (if futile) question.

It comes down to the amount of surprise we should experience at finding evidence of any ET civilization. Arguably, given the sheer number of other worlds that we now know to exist, it's surprising that we haven't found any such evidence.

At the same time, given the vast distances involved, it would be surprising if any evidence that we might find didn't consist of something truly unusual and spectacular on a stellar scale... something like a Dyson structure that only one in a million civilizations might be capable of creating. With our current observational tech, we'd never notice anything less.

In the OP, Sharlin used the term "outlandish." That's a value judgement, not a term of art. It's a judgment we're not qualified to make.
"Escalator" is an interesting name. Here in Brazil escalators are called "rolling stairs" (escada rolante).
Well, when the frequency of your dimming spans across a century (and only for 20%).. you'll be long dead when the bit has flipped.
Most of the Underground network is inaccessible, note the lack of access symbols on the map.

http://content.tfl.gov.uk/standard-tube-map.pdf

Until recently disabled access wasn't really considered. The Docklands Light Railway which started in the late 1980s, and the late 90s Jubilee line extension are the only fully accessible bits on the network.
Show HN: A lightweight React setup with React-intl for internationalization
On one hand, I get the desire for transparency, having sought after it for many years, esp. back when it was a rarefied commodity. But these days I find I'm mostly only in favor of either fully opaque windows or transparency that's darn near fully opaque. Just enough transparency to hint that there's something tucked behind a full- or half- screen window. I find that it's too just easy to compromise contrast and readability in editor windows.
Robert Heinlein wrote a short story about this concept named The Roads Must Roll. He uses it to illustrate class differences.
It's dangerous because the person in the middle can't hold a handrail.
I accidentally stumbled across this while searching for some obscure IC part numbers. The wording is something like "we have removed results of suspected child abuse" (emphasis mine --- I remember that part the clearest), and that scared me for several reasons; the implication that just being "suspected" is enough to censor, whether this was logged and now my searches are being scrutinised even more, and the reminder of effectively how much power they have over what people can find on the Internet.

I'd use DuckDuckGo if it weren't for the fact that its index is far smaller than Google's, although with the latter's increasingly aggressive pruning of results, maybe that won't remain the case for long...
Overhead. Two one-person escalators next to each other require more space than one two-person escalator.
Occam's razor
Occam's razor is often described as 'the simplest solution is often the correct one'.

What it really means is: Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected. This is not the same as the "simplest solution".

Reducing assumptions which may or not be correct - reduces the likelihood overall of being incorrect. That doesn't mean the simple solution must be the right one.
So if all the humanities papers have a serious message which is just somehow obscured due to circumstances outside the author's control, you would expect at least someone (particularly the editors of the journals) to understand them.

But how can the Sokal affair[1] be explained then? There clearly no-one understood it but it was still published.

I suspect Sturgeon's law[2] applies to the humanities, as well as to a lot of other things.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
Interesting. I believe that VistA's (VA Hospital EHR) was originally open sourced because of a FOI filing. And then they (more-or-less) got behind it seriously. Contrary to the title of this posting, in 2005-or-so, there was more than one company formed around commercializing VistA that pulled down venture funding. Draper-Fisher-Jurvetson funded one, and I forget the other...

But this was strictly a "toss over the wall" kind of deal. No community edits or changes ever make it upstream. Is that the kind of thing you are talking about, or would you envision a structure where improvements were re-absorbed into the borg?
I'm sorry, what false dichotomy? I haven't suggested one.
I remember seeing a similar complaint in the 1.4 release thread complaining about memory usage, and when I compared my own Atom memory usage with a project with about a half-dozen files open and it wasn't anyhere close to that.

Wonder what's going on.
Strictly speaking I guess a phone-home feature that isn't turned off would do just fine.

Would be interesting to know how good the fighting parties are with that...