skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I think you underestimate the practical difficulties of providing 7 billion people with top-notch public transport and other public services

While some public transport issues increases with density (harder to e.g. dig new tunnels), one of the major issues with public transport at scale is the cost of laying rails and digging tunnels, and amortising those costs over larger populations makes it far more affordable. Once you have the rails, density means you can offer far more frequent service, which makes a huge difference to users. Being able to just assume there'll always be a train within a minute or two is a huge deal to get people to actually use public transport. Density also works the other way and reduces the need in many cases, as well as drop delivery costs and give new options (e.g. I can get stuff from one of the local Amazon competitors couriered over in 2 hours) that first become cost effective when density is high enough to create big enough markets.

> (though there are artists' renditions, most of them dystopian)

That may be so, but density to an extent also creates opportunity. E.g. my local road takes up roughly 45,000 square metres. Of this, roughly 1/3 is gardens where each family in effect only gets use of a very small portion, leaving many of them largely unused. Another roughly 1/3 is pavement, front yards mostly used for bins etc., and the road. Near our local station, new highrises are going up that will house almost the same number of people on a couple of thousand square metres of space. That's a lot of space freed up.

In other words: The question is how far you want to go. If you slash space wasted on roads and wasted duplication, and increase heights, you can get massive increases in density almost everywhere and still end up with more desirable and practically usable space for most people to actually use for things other than transport that is only necessary due to the low density. If you go further than that, and take away all the green space etc., then yes, you get a dystopia.

But you don't need to go very far. E.g. where I live is relatively average density for London. Increase the density of the London metro area five times, and you could empty the entirety of the rest of the UK into London. If every road like mine was replaced with high rises, you'd be able to achieve that with ease and still be left with vast empty tracts of land for new parks (and allotments for those who actually use their gardens today). London makes up well below 1% of the land area of the UK.

I'm not suggesting it'd be a good idea to create a single megacity for the entire UK population. But achieving the density would free up huge amounts of land even if we set aside space for lots of big new parks. It'd also save vast amounts of energy used on transport by cutting distances for most travel.
Just in case some managers rejoice and get ideas, here are the average German IT salaries according to Handelsblatt:

http://www.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/beruf-und-buero/buer...

Good luck hiring someone for 20.000 per year.
Here's what I pay for:

http://nsscreencast.com/episodes $9/month.

Github is $12/month.

Ask people what they actually pay for because people might not spend the money once you build it.
I'm sorry to say that but there is no real injustices in western countries. Everybody has food, education, a minimal healthcare and even luxury products like smartphone or TV.

It's very different in Africa where life expectancy is near 45:

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

A lot of problems in western countries comes from the society itself (how the society is organized and how it works) and most of them can't be solved with laws.
"They are more, and thus get more votes" that is _proportional_ voting. x% of the people have x% of the vote.

Disproportionate means they get _more_ than you would already expect from proportional representation.
On another note from your article, the Pi Zero is selling for more than the Pi3 on EBay. Thought that was interesting. Glad I bought mine at the $5 price. :)
I read a study that I am now searching for that showed MRI scans of people trying to change their mind about a subject. It consumed huge amounts of energy. People's brains are built to build an accurate, complete view of the survival landscape and forgo any wasted energy beyond that. Tolerence can be socialized in at a young age but changing your mind consumes huge amounts of resources better spent perpetuating survival. People obtain the same life milestones now, only on a protracted timeline. My thesis is that progress will be slower than before, for exactly as long as old/tired humans stick around.
While I'm reluctant to say these paths are a "dead end", this reminded me of an interview to Yann LeCun[0] from a while ago. I think you might want to read it, he sort of shared your view. However, deep neural networks are an extremely valuable and resourceful tool, when used against the real set of problems they solve.

Basically, what I think is happening with the NY Times (and press in general) regarding AI is one of the first questions that he is asked. "Your editor is not gonna like that" -- press goes for flashy and shiny announcements that are really far from what is really happening. And because marketing and funding, some researchers back that kind of announcements and say "Yeah! We've built a robot that smiles!". I'm not saying androids and robotics are not valuable research, I'm saying that people missinterpret and mistake many things for AI and expect a poet robot that can talk like Shakespear, and mean and feel the emotional component of its words. Not gonna happen soon.

[0] http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intel...
Is there a difference (assuming the vacation residence isn't rented out daily/weekly)? Either way, prime real-estate is being tied up and made inaccessible to residents.

Related thought... I wonder how much AirBnB plays into this? I'm vacationing in Florence later this year and was surprised at the large number of available flats in the historic center. Not just rooms, or random apartments, but in some cases significant portions of buildings.
Louisiana is like the wild west of alcohol control. I'm pretty sure you can go to a bar, get a drink to go at 5 am, and take it to another bar (while drinking it on the street).
Pretty sure the article is written tongue-in-cheek
That is correct, New York is 4am. And I even remember many years of my life when 4am used to seem impossibly early and oppressive. I don't remember them all that well mind you.
underestimate the practical difficulties

My point is not that this is easy/hard, but rather: it's easier to
provide top notch infra structure for the worlds population if it is
concentrated in a few dense urban centres, rather than spread out. I
find this hard to contest. Just think about distance, bearing in mind
that the cost of sewage systems, rail (over- and underground),
fibre-optic cables and so on basically tracks distance.

if you split everyone into groups of 200k to 2m

This is an interesting point. B b b but ...

I cannot think of an existing city with 200k inhabitants and
great infrastructure. I can't even think of a city with 2m
inhabitants whose infrastructure can compete with world leaders such
as Tokio, Manhattan, Hong Kong and the like. And even in these places
the best infrastructure is found in the densest parts of the city, not
in the outskirts.

Note that the cities you have in mind, say European cities of
200k - 1m size, are rather spread out, and low density. I have lived in enough of those.

But it would be really interesting to have cities that have 200k - 1m
inhabitants and are extremely dense like central Hong Kong. Such small cities may
be big and dense enough to have the economies of scale of their larger
rivals. But, as pointed out by "vidarh", they would not
remotely match megacities in terms of interesting cultural life.

not a hypothetical,

I don't think it works that well. European cities of 200k - 2m are
car-centric in my experience. I supect China would run into major
problems if its population live in low-density European style cities
with 200k inhabitants each.
I can't see how any appliance would be required to be online for use or configuration. Even every laptop off the shelf doesn't have such a requirement. The only device I know that does is a smart phone (maybe?).
Magic: The Gathering, Meet Continuous Delivery and DevOps
Someone made a nice graphic that shows opening times in the US:
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/3ddapj/bar...
That still relies on proprietary firmware on the actual chip itself.
I got a "for life" server years ago. I didn't expect it to really be for my life, but I at least hoped it would be for the life of the company. It wasn't.

Oh well. At least I got a few years out of it and learned never to deal with Joyent.
Your experience will not be unfamiliar to millions of kids who grew up in the military, at least the American one with bases all over the world. I don't think it makes people weird or unable to form friendships. The reason you're not talking to your friend from 20 years ago is you don't have anything in common any more. That's normal.
Joining the EU does not make it a part of Europe. Turkey is used as the definition of where Europe ends. While Istanbul is an exception, being a transcontinental city.
90mW (+ ~90mW waste heat) is 180mW. WiFi & LTE each draw about 700mW.
Show HN: React Client for Deutsche Bahn API (German Railway Corp. API)
> IMO, this is one of the reasons that people are into at least talking about Bernie Sanders style socialism.

Yeah but that doesn't make it right. Look at the lashback from the right against Immigration and the rise of Donald Trump. It has been hard for everyone, and human nature is to find individuals or groups to blame.

I am an advocate of sanity on both ends. The left loves to talk about 'revolution' (as if right wing doesn't love to do that, except it calls it 'secession' and 'nullification') but the harsh truth is, we are about a million miles away from a revolution/secession/nullification.

A revolution against the 'injustice' won't move 2 blocks from Times Square before it goes so violent that it would be an effective stalemate.

There are far too many private guns in America for there to be a successful revolution. Civil War is more likely (lets not forget this is what really happened in China and Russia).

Similarly a secession/nullification isn't happening irrespective of how many illegal immigrants arrive in this country (again thanks 2nd amendment for that).

The principles true for the rest of the world just aren't that easily possible for America. There is no extreme right wing or left wing party winning election (Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are hardly the American Golden Dawn, UKIP or Hollande of America). American citizenry is heavily armed and hate speech is legal. Neo-nazis can freely march in America (that surprisingly neuters the power these groups have).
Sadly, all of the IoT-devices I have read about so far are either deeply creepy (like that Barbie doll that records and transmits children's conversations to the mothership) or completely useless (like a razor that automatically orders new blades).

And given the mediocre job we have done with online security so far, one can easily think of half a dozen scenarios for the "IoT" (the term alone makes me cringe) to turn in to security nightmare. Think of the Windows malware wave of 2003, when you could not install XP on an internet-connected machine without catching some worm before the installation was finished; now think of billions of lightbulbs, fridges, thermostats and whatnot and how much thought their designers must have put into security. Unless we wise up soon, the future is going to become very "interesting".

EDIT: I just remembered one useful device - a networked smoke detector that the fire department remotely query to see e.g. what parts of a building a fire has spread to and that can tell a central computer when its battery runs out. I could imagine this being really, really useful often enough that it's worth it. But still, the security concern remains. (IIRC, the smoke detectors were not connected to the internet and did not use regular Wifi, which would make sense - if my living room is on fire, my internet connection and wifi router probably aren't so much working as ... liquified.)
Show HN: Agilitree – The Todo List for Vim Users
I'm glad I'm not alone in thinking this. Every little corner of the application seems to have a new UX failure or short coming that blows my mind.
Sure Robots can make sensible estimates based on math and economics. But do they have the human touch?

AI challenges remaining in this field: pushing loser funds on unsuspecting clients; pumping and dumping near announcement dates; exploiting numerology for fun and profit (dividend repricing, splits and mergers etc); recognizing fear and its opportunities.
I realize it varies, but most of the US has some sort of last-call. I think Vegas and New Orleans are the only cities I've visited (in the US) without one.
The Software Engineer's Online Handbook
>> What they claim to be doing is totally reasonable, and pretty much every IoT device works like this. There's simply no good way to get out-of-the-home communication to work reliably without having the device connect to the cloud.

None of these devices need out-of-the-home communication for the users benefit. Not even Nest.
"Estimated waiting time: 9145.0 minutes"

This is not how you are going to earn billions ;)
Apple-FBI Row Spurs Senate Bill on Encrypted Data Access
In theory, a for-life service could operate similarly to financial instruments such as annuities and life insurance. Insurance and reinsurance could cover "catastrophic" events such as the company failing. Essentially, actuarial science could underpin such a venture.

Not that I think that's happening here or that the price would be anywhere near as attractive...but then again, a bet on cheaper computing and network bandwidth in the future seems like a sound one.
How to Run Ruby Scripts on AWS Lambda Using Ansible
There are interesting developments in formally defined and verified programs (including implementations). For certain domains that are non-intuitive, exploring the solution-space is now much nearer in reach.

For example (as I noted in private communication to John Koza) exploring the protocol-space of distributed consensus algorithms on top of something like Microsoft Research's IronFleet (with the GP generating Gafny code) appears to be both possible and imo a fruitful avenue for researchers in the field.

[p.s. Note that Genetic Programming is distinct from Genetic Algorithms.]
Florida’s Housing Market Continues Strong Track in January 2016
I look forward to the future where I can come home and my space will welcome me individually, turning on lights, media, and climate to my personal preferences, and respond to "tea, earl gray, hot" at any time. My groceries and other expendables will replenish as they run low; menu planning will stock more. I'll get a chime when my kids arrive home, and another if their love interest show up after hours. Etc etc. All this information will be held strictly per my privacy settings and is fully encrypted when offsite.

Now, the real question is, how do we get there, integrated and private, without selling out the whole stack to 100 different vendors with different API's, without one of them hacking the rest of your network, and without your government either hacking you, hacking one of those vendors, or just pressuring them for your data?

I don't have an answer.
Microsoft Hololens Development Edition Open for Pre-Order
> and promptly changed their mind.

They didn't. They _sued_ Google, trying force them to link to them (and, naturally, pay for it – a paltry 6% of Google's revenue in Germany¹). It was turned down by the courts in September², only then was Google given a gratis license by some publishers.

Smaller actors (other search engines, newspapers, bloggers, …), of course, can't afford risking such a confrontation and now have to pay up for the privilege! of being allowed to advertise for Axel Springer publications.

This, too, ended up in the courts, as said smaller actors sued the publishers over the gratis license given to Google, claiming it was anti-competitive. The case is handled in secret, VG Media (the organisation founded by AS to handle licensing) is suppressing information of it from becoming public.³

¹: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Leistungsschutzrecht-...

²: http://www.bundeskartellamt.de/SharedDocs/Meldung/DE/Pressem...

³: http://www.golem.de/news/gratislizenz-fuer-google-die-streng...
1) yes, if it works like i want 2) no, i could bot that 3) Simple? Then no, i could code that. 4) Probably
I do fully understand how the technology works. Let me explain:

"punching holes through firewalls" <-- This _simply_ means that the device does a connect() call towards the clients IP:port while the client does a connect() towards the device:port at roughly the same time. You simply use the fact that a simple home router opens up a temporary rule allowing the destination:port to respond to your outgoing request. This won't work on symmetric NAT's for instance.

It's basically a completely safe method and does not open up for anyone else to connect ...

(The enabled by default is as I wrote in my original post is another question. The way I read the article it seems like the core focus of the post is to say that the solution used is bad or unsafe, which with given information cannot be said).
I think this has more to do with the way you consume friendship than with the idea in general.

For me personally, even if I live in the same town as my best friend, I will barely see him. Most communication that deeply matters to me happens through text messages or email, not through in-person interaction.

I also tend to have a very small number of people that I consider friends, but I am fiercely loyal and protective of that small set of people. I don't want a large network of friends because my experience in life is that very few people are able or willing to help me and very few people share the perspectives that I have.

For the few that make good friends, geographical distance is one of the last things I would expect to affect the friendship.
Gopher VR
I'm curious - how did you determine defensible discount rates at McKinsey?
You can live without sex, but not food.
No, in a flow cell.
First of all the issue is mainly with C, not C++.

C++ does provide the necessary features to write safe code, as long as one stays away from "C with C++ compiler" mentality and adopts those language and library features.

As for the tools, they are largely ignored by the majority of enterprise developers, assuming Herb Sutter's presentation at CppCon 2015 is in any way representative (1% of the audience said they were using them).

Which goes in line with my (now) outdated C++ professional experience up to 2006.

Only one company cared to pay for Insure++ (in 2000) and I was probably the only one that cared to have it installed.

Also except for my time at CERN, I never met many top elite C++ developers.

Most were using it as "C with C++ compiler" and in teams with high attrition, leading to situations where no one was 100% sure what the entire codebase was doing.
I've a very strong vision of holoprojections. From sitting through numerous meetings with remote teams, where tele- or video-conferences just doesn't work.

People lose focus, even through video interaction. How incredible would it to be to walk through an office and interact with colleagues, that simply aren't there (not an American Psycho reference. They are there, any you can see and talk to them in the physical whole, they're simple not _physically_ there).

How would this change things? Initially, perhaps not a lot, 10 to 15 years out. Physical interaction would still be deemed prime. And this vision is sans-headset (office decoration firms get busy preparing multiple remote sites). Beyond that timeframe, would it be so normal to have a strong business relationship with someone never physically met? What would be the impact of 'hanging out' over lunch to develop relationships. That seems a bigger challenge.

But to put that in perspective, it is only 400 years since Shakespeare's death, that's 10 generations of people that live until 40, or more realistically around 7 generations of hereditary lifespans where the youngest generation is in physical/educational contact with the eldest generation. That's not a long time for transfer of ideas for revolutionary ideas to happen.

Will we all be on a tropical beach developing VR apps? No. Old nature dies hard. This is an augmentation, not a replacement.
Sounds like Friday afternoon to me.
If I made a zeno's paradox loop:

bigFloat delta = 0.5
bigFloat total = 0.0
while total < 1.0:
total+=delta
delta*=0.5

Where does this fit in the model of using a loop invariant to show the loop terminates?
The loop is always approaching the terminal case (and eventually the machine runs out of memory)
This is really really cool. As a Java developer, this really helps me understand the "magic" of Javascript a bit better.
I dont think robots will kind of "save" the boomers. They have already secured their path to hell.

Wait until they start "getting the savings out of the stock market" (eg to pay for robots or medicine). This wont be a "pleasent" day at all. Guess what, the stock market will collaps! There is no one buying all those stocks!(its the same with insurance. where is the insurance "invested"?)...their savings will evaporate, they dont have children or the children will be gone (to foreign nations).

Its looking grim for those ruthless, egoistic baby boomers. They just dont understand this yet.
Irena Spa
what kind of suit do the mushrooms that have absorbed your toxins (lest they be released into the environment) have to wear so when they die, they wont simply decompose and release your toxins?

Or what if the mushrooms holding your toxins are ingested by animals, would it pass through and then ultimately poison the earth?
China is one of the biggest automobile market by sales in the world
They do; it's a 2.5A, 5.1V adaptor. I've ordered one myself (from here: http://au.rs-online.com/web/p/plug-in-power-supply/9098135/?...)
Especially as the FAQ still says: As of Feb 2015 there probably wont be a new model in the next 2-3 years.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/help/faqs/#generalFuture