skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Street congestion is increasingly a problem, not so much because it slows down private cars but because it slows down buses. Those bus delays in turn increase subway ridership, and overcrowding slows trains loading and unloading.

Although uber does probably deserve some of the blame the mayor's attempted response was ham-fisted and bound the fail. The answer is a congestion fee like Bloomberg wanted to put in. Also eliminating most city employee parking permits and upping the cost of on-street parking to prevent circling.

As for the subway, it depends on the line. The Lexington Avenue line is the most overcrowded. More trains can't be added at this point -- at least not without CBTC (which they should really prioritize more!) The second avenue subway should help there, but that's not exactly around the corner either. After the Lexington Line the next most congested is the L, which is only relevant to a small part of Manhattan (but has big implications for growth in northern Brooklyn) and the E/F coming in from Queens until it hits midtown. That leaves the majority of Manhattan with spare subway capacity to move people around.

Specifically with respect to the East Village, it is because of crowding on the Lexington line that I suggested densification should start at the south-west part of the neighborhood which has access to the sixth avenue line subways.
Erlang would look be a very interesting choice here, seeing how any Erlang system is basically a miniature OS. It even has an init already.
Intuitively you should expect rich kids to have an advantage in every endeavor because they have more resources. Rich kids can afford private tutors (which provides a 2 standard deviation improvement compared to 1 for Khan style learning), have more time and are less distracted by problems that can be solved with money. That's to say nothing of the behavioral differences that result from a privileged upbringing and which are arguably more important than extrinsic factors.
This bit is interesting:

"Thanks also to the Dropbox product security team for feedback on docs and signal/noise issues"

Dropbox, as I remember it, is distributed as "encrypted" pyc files and a modified python runtime that decrypts them. This implies that "secrets" are in their python runtime binary.[1]

Makes you wonder what their feedback on signal/noise was,then...perhaps something that kept this from being used to trivially retrieve the keys :)

[1] https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
It occurs everywhere, proportionally. The effect isn't great enough to notice unless you are looking at light-years.

Also, gravity and electromagnetism increase at close proximity, so on less-than-cosmic scales, they overcome the minute amount of spatial expansion.
This is a great introduction to accessing the world of serious, sophisticated knowledge. But could someone discuss ways a layperson can get access to these expensive publications?

Subcribing one at a time is very to prohibitively expensive, especially as an individual. Options like joining a university library or JSTOR are also pricey and often too inconvenient: In my brief look at U. libraries, they wouldn't allow remote access to the information, requiring in-person visits.

Google Scholar is nice, but often points to articles that are inaccessible.
"Astronomers have concluded that the universe began some 12 to 15 billion years ago. That means we can only see the part of it that lies within 12 to 15 billion light-years from us."

This is false, because it ignores the metric expansion of spacetime. We can see radiation from objects that are now ~46.5 billion light-years from Earth.

This isn't picking nits. The explanation given here makes it sound like the Universe is a Euclidean volume that got instantaneously filled with stars, at roughly their present density, and that this density is low enough that light from distant stars hasn't reached us yet. If this were true, it wouldn't only explain why the sky is dark now, but predict that it has always been dark. We know this is false: for the first 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the Universe was filled with hydrogen plasma and completely opaque to radiation, which we can still see in the form of CMBR. As spacetime expands, energy density decreases, space becomes less light-emitting and more transparent, and light already in transit becomes red-shifted. Our field of vision is still technically flooded with light, as it always has been, but by now the red-shift is so extreme that the light is in the radio spectrum.
Unlikely to happen, they went UTF-16 long ago.
Health insurance had been attempted by the democrats a few times so there was definitely existing support. Also passed for children, also exists as medicare, medicaid. So it had examples for things being better, just needed a huge push.

Now the health insurance we ended up with is a horrible compromise (this is personal for me, I still cannot get health insurance).

And that's with so many congress people throwing themselves into the fire and literally ending their careers by voting for that horrible compromised bill.

How in the heck do you think the radical ideas Bernie is proposing is going to get 51% of the house and 51% of the Senate?

Everyone needs healthcare, so they can relate somehow.

Now compare that to the radical reshuffle that would be needed for "free" education (which to be clear I think is a good idea).

No way senate and house throw themselves into the fire for most of what Bernie is proposing, no way.

It's a non-issue anyway, there is no way in hell America is going to elect a 78 year old Jewish man who constantly waves his arms around when he talks.

He's a great guy and a great senator and he should be proud but this country is not going to make him president, hell the democrats won't even let him win the primary, no way.

ps. he also ran 4.5 minute miles in high school which is amazing
I have a job now but I went through the interview process recently. It was actually the opposite. because I didn't have a lot of experience in the newest versions and didn't come off real confident, I got passed on a lot. never mind in the last 3 years I helped deliver a 20m project in language I never used before and in my spare time learned lua to build a mobile app. One of the interviewers comments was "I think he could do the job he's just didn't come off well in the interview." WTF? Didn't even get a chance to do the're little coding challenge.
It is actually easier for the NSA if you host in Europe, but that is not really the point is it? Take America down a notch is the real goal.
Thanks! :) We were really thrilled to post the problem.

Our rope question from expii.com/solve is a multi-layered math puzzle. If you haven't seen it before, the answer is often quite surprising: a human can walk under the circle even though the 710 inches of extra length are shared over the whole earth's circumference. Basic human intuition produces the most common answers, which are the bacteria or the ladybug. This helps to illustrate the purpose of math: to help us reason to determine the truth when basic intuition fails. If basic intuition were always right, then we wouldn't need math!

If you had seen the puzzle before though, you would already know that the rope lifts high, because it lifts by 710/(2*pi) inches, which is 113.0000095... taking us to the second layer of math embedded deeper in the problem. That is remarkably close to a whole number, which is surprising because pi is an irrational number. This means that pi is very close to 355/113, which brings us to the topic of Continued Fraction representations of irrational numbers, and amazing rational approximations of pi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mil%C3%BC

So, this problem hits at both basic and advanced levels. :)

There are many interesting ways to teach math through multi-layered puzzles which have something for everyone, no matter where you are in the experience spectrum. Our goal is to provide these for free, disseminated over the Internet. :)
Executive Order – Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity
Completely off topic, but the phrase "always an amusing resource for complex issues" contains the wittiest act of hyperlinking I've seen in a while.
disguising I think.
Perfection is a nice strawman to argue against. "Mostly perfect" is harder to argue against. In addition, there's an implied "for my purposes" attached to the end of the statement.

Nothing is "perfect", and no one has claimed that "Linux is perfect".
Executive Order – Establishment of the Federal Privacy Council
My point was that mirroring Twitter on identi.ca made identi.ca worse. Lots of people were automatically posting their Twitter updates on identi.ca, but never replying or caring about the interactions they had there. Same with blogs RSS feeds being fed to identi.ca.

I don't know where we are with multi-protocol clients. Back then I was using https://launchpad.net/gwibber (before it was rewritten to use CouchDB and stopped working for me, I don't know what is its current status).

I didn't post like that, I had two accounts and used both; until I got bored of bots on identi.ca and, in practice, I was only using Twitter.

EDIT: changed Gwibber link to launchpad as the .com doesn't seem to be maintained.
This error only occurred on a certain revision of GPS satellites, not all of them. It would have been a problem, except luckily the error was only on a message for determining UTC. The error did not affect the message or clock that are used in determining position.
Didn't when I posted it
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11061992 (565 points, 19 hours ago, 214 comments)
Yeah the problem with Go and "async processes" doesn't have to do with GC -- it has to do with M:N threading. I'm glad Rust abandoned M:N threading.

Though it is definitely a killer feature of Go to write in a blocking style rather than in a state machine style... but I feel that there might have been a way to do it without baking it so hard into the runtime (?). Maybe like coroutines in Python, which run on a single thread and are optional.

M:N threading causes a lot of other complications too, like calling from C to Go, etc.
Yes, this is currently true, and will continue to be, unless we end in the Big Crunch.
I've always been puzzled by this paradox. More particularly, I'm baffled that apparently the mainstream explanation involves cosmological arguments such that the expansion of the Universe. Is it really that complicated?

Take Hubble's deep field image, for instance. It was shot in a tiny area of the sky that looks completely black. But with enough exposure, Hubble found that it's actually full of galaxies. Can't I just conclude that if this part of the sky if completely black, it's not because space is expending, but just because our eyes are not sensitive enough?

Olber's Paradox points out that wherever we look at, at some distance our line of sight will meet the surface of a star. But that does not mean that this point will register as a light for our eyes. Our eyes would have to be sensitive enough.
May I get one? Email is in my profile.
The hard thing as a PM is where to draw the line of something being needed or not. In idealistic world we all want to build just features that are used by most of the users. But is that most 90%? 51%? What if a core feature is needed by just 10 or 25%?

The same goes for the kill line. Do you remove something if it's used by less than 50% of users? Or is it 10% or 1%?

Values and priorities are nice, but even with those well listed the questions above stay.

Intercom might talk about saying no, but it has grown from a simple single-feature product to an OS where mos people use just a small part of it. Preach or practice?
I've recently interviewed in 10+ companies (interviewed as went to the last part of the process) and just changed jobs.

I have a degree in computer engineer and 5 years of experience, what I have to say:

1. In the interview process I always feel really hard to know how deep I should go in the answer... I had the same design an short url service in two different companies, one complained that I went too deep and didn't talked about the thing on a system level too much. Other said I didn't went too deep and looked like over heardish as I focused on the system level.

2. I've studied a lot of algorithms and data structure as every company thinks they are google and asks for big o notations, algorithms optimisations, implement a tree, reverse a tree blablabla. This part was the easiest in all companies as I "gamed" the system by studying it weeks in advance. Does it make me a better developer? Probably not, I already knew that stuff but if you asked me to go deep in those questions when it wasn't fresh in my mind I wouldn't be able to develop an answer. I am pretty sure that 6 months from now I won't be able to answer them in a satisfactory manner

3. I had the same singleton question and I didn't answer correctly, gave an answer like you said. Basically, I know what a singleton is, I've used this pattern in the past. Even in a C++ embedded systems app running in a touchscreen + ARM.
But, please, don't ask me nuances about it. If I really wanted I could just game it as well by reading some cracking the interview questions on design patterns.

The best interviews I had were a CHAT where I talked about previous project, challenges and etc.

Not some question / answer quiz game where the interviewer is in a position of authority and I am always concerned that I am giving the answer he is expecting.
For most people "start your own server" is not the real goal. People who want to run their own will choice to do so and are able to look in the docs.

People who just want twitter should just get that.
To my knowledge, Erlang uses a cooperative scheduler. The process itself counts downs its reductions and yields when it is time. The programmer can call erlang:yield() to do this before time if he wants. Calling something like receive will also yield. I guess it comes down to definitions, but since Erlang is said to have only soft real-time (as opposed to hard real-time) properties, this makes more sense. The schedulers doesn't give any guarantees as to when a process gets to run and the scheduler never really preempts a process. Again, to my knowledge.

Great article though!
Thanks, we changed the URL to that from http://www.fi.edu/learn/sci-tech/automaton/automaton.php. If anyone's curious, the reason is that we invited js2 to repost https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3407558, an ancient submission, without realizing that the old URL was broken.
Craft by InVision LABS
I don't think MSE is yet enabled on Firefox mobile, it was not working the last time I tested.

It says unsupported here, I guess this one is up to date:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MediaSource
There's a better interview here: http://www.somethingawful.com/comedy-goldmine/steve-ballmer-...
Quantity, as someone once said, has a quality all of its own. That said, practice doesn't always make perfect; it forms habits. It's easy to form bad habits, and reflective practice, mindfulness, etc, are only partial solutions to that problem.
One of my favorite short stories about this is The Last Question by Isaac Asimov

http://multivax.com/last_question.html
Yes, but as you look deeper into the night sky, you see more and more stars (proportional to the square of the distance). These two factors cancel exactly.
Not sure Joe specifically was likely to attain this, but I think a plumber is a lot more likely then most to hit this benchmark. He can start his own business, hire employees, etc. and he's reasonably well protected from competition. No reason he can't exceed $250K.
> Gmail has always supported encryption in transit using TLS, and will automatically encrypt your incoming and outgoing emails if it can. We support industry-standard authentication to help combat email impersonation.

> 1. If you receive a message from, or are about to send a message to, someone whose email service doesn’t support TLS encryption, you’ll see a broken lock icon in the message.

> 2. If you receive a message that can’t be authenticated, you’ll see a question mark in place of the sender’s profile photo, corporate logo, or avatar.

AKA, it operates like the lock in my URL bar right now except in reverse. By the way Google has explained this feature, it seems fairly good to me. At least it doesn't say "this is secure" because, among other vulnerabilities, the remote server admin can still read what is received (as has always been the case with email).
I think they were saying if we're conceding infinite size and an infinite number of stars, why not an infinite amount of those lighter elements as well?
In an infinitely large universe, the net force of cosmic gravity would be 0.

Kind of like how an real number divides the number line into "same size" infinite intervals.

Granted, entropy in the system would cause matter to clump into larger and larger bunches. But if the matter were perfectly arranged by an outside force (e.g. God) and didn't deteriorate, the universe could remain static.
Just no consequences that Twitter is allowed to impose.
RT'ing and quoting work better. That's about it.

Things Twitter could be doing, besides your excellent suggestion of reopening the API:

-Self-deleting tweets, for the Snapchat kids.

-Better threading on conversations. Anything more than 2 people and it's a mess.

-Thumbnails for any URL. Right now if you plop the URL of an image in, it just shows as a line of text.

-Twitter is often used as RSS, so why not have a Google Reader-type viewer?

-More transparency on bans and deverification.

-Fix search. Sometimes its performance is embarrassing.
Peak Google (2014)
Still working it through. The steps as I see it:

Figure out which browsers to support on which features: https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/

Have an alternate .babelrc with a transpile blacklist that points to a separate dest

Build a regex to match those browsers in your CDN (I use Fastly). Vary on the value you create.

Point said browsers asking for the normal JS payload to the alternate dest.
Set d=0, answer falls out right away.
In my view, everything you need to understand the difference, culturally and economically, between Canada and the United States, follows from two important phrases found in the respective founding documents of the countries:

"Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" - America

"Peace, Order and Good Government" - Canada
US law has virtually nothing to say about how Twitter chooses to run its service.
I have no opinion on healthcare funding. I was just explaining how a lower total cost could still result in greater govt spending and taxes.
therefore the statement " all matter eventually separates in this way" , strictly speaking, seems false since gravity and electromagnetism overcome expansion at local levels.
Most stars we see are burning Hydrogen, possibly helium, in a process of gravity well driven nuclear fusion. This fusion results in heavier atomic particles and some waste that we see as radiation (light, heat, various forms of EM energy).

I am not an astrophysicist, nor am I an expert in the early universe, but I recall that the prevailing theories of our time are that somehow the universe came in to being with predominantly hydrogen atoms. These combine through fusion in what we call stars to form denser matter. This process continues until the result of combining the elements reaches a limit. I believe that iron happens to be that limit if I recall correctly.

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

Describes what I recall reading/hearing many years ago.
Even without the plugin, you can spawn a diff in vim via git's difftool settings. Here's a basic version that can be used in one's .gitconfig:

[diff]
tool = customvim
[difftool "customvim"]
cmd = vim -R -f -d \"$LOCAL\" \"$REMOTE\"
Amazon Echo is a sleeper hit, and the rest of America is about to discover it
Hi, I'm Ami and Iam the founder & CTO of Woo.
Thanks for adding us to hacker news :)
The service is currently by invitation only because it's important to us to get the right techies on-board and keep our service quality.
However this community is definitely unique and special so here is an exclusive invite which you can use to bypass the invitation request.

Feel free to share your feedback!

https://woo.io/eng/useinvite?token=1085A2AA0E9B89D90AF94BCD0...
It's great that you're concerned about civility on HN, and believe me I sympathize with the condition of not remembering things one has a degree in. But I'm afraid you misread aroberge—who was trying to reassure the reader that they needn't assume graduate physics—and unfortunately your reply crosses into incivility itself.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11067987 and marked it off-topic.
[I'm the author of diff-so-fancy, Steve helped with shipping it as a standalone script]

NPM?!? :)

A lot of people below are asking why a bash script (that depends on a perl script) is being recommended to install via NPM? The short reason is that NPM is the most straightforward way to get a script installed as a global binary in a cross-platform manner. This approach has worked quite well with `git-open`[0]. Asking all users to deal with the PATH is not my ideal.

In addition, I wanted a reasonable upgrade path, in case there are neccessary bugfixes. It's not a great experience if users identify bugs but the fix means they manually find it/download/PATH-ify each time. :/

That said, I'll add some Manual Install instructions to the readme so it's clear how to do this on your own. :)
( Edit: Here they are… https://github.com/stevemao/diff-so-fancy/blob/master/readme... )

[0] https://github.com/paulirish/git-open
This is fairly recent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2A7V3GLWF6U
It could be because Parse was engineered not to be easily deployed but heavily dependent on Facebook infrastructure or the code that is there isn't fit for release.
This is pretty close to fundamentally a monadic approach. Arrow approaches to effect management are sometimes similar and sometimes very different. It's hard to be more clear since unifying these things as effects is perhaps tenuous than trying to find their common points.
Adult Neurogenesis May Be Increased by Sustained Aerobic Exercise
Meteor adding first-party support for GraphQL
You're free to argue that, but it's still fair for everyone to concede that there's a difference in friction between "I can do what I need, now" and "I have to wait for the language core to add features trailing discovering of these niche needs".

Also, the subject's been raised before, and regrettably (IMO) the proposal rejected. As a result, you'll find a nontrivial amount of C appearing in e.g. the runc project. (Which is a crying shame, because it invoking cgo means runc ceased to be trivially reproducibly buildable, last time I checked...)
I follow about 1200 but the number of accounts that are still active are probably around 100. Lots of failed startups and joke accounts in there.
All good then ;)
I actually heard about this startup from a friend at work today (we're not from the US). Decided to post on HN after work (my evening is your early morning).
Griffiths and then Sakurai's quantum mechanics texts should contain what you're trying to recall. They're two I held onto after finishing grad school.
Hack the Strategy, Hack the Product
A good proportion of HN, judging by comments, thinks all advertising should be illegal in all circumstances because trying to persuade someone to do something is immoral.

Edit: "A good proportion", not all. Probably 20%? The other 80% indeed are just against tracking/privacy/bandwidth/security, and the last 10% are fine as is.
The Ugly Indian
Golang and positive constraints
MDG is currently discussing their initial approach integrating GraphQL support in Meteor.

Once this lands the sky is the limit! Everybody is really excited.
I like this idea but worry novices won't understand what a red flag (lock) really means and only assume the worst.
This. "Lean" and "agile" emphasize feedback and iteration over great engineering. For a large number of apps, that's acceptable.