skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Budapest metro is 6 years older than the NYC subway. The Tokyo metro is also 90 years old, as is the Barcelona metro.

High density rich cities like Hong Kong do it cheaper. Sprawling low density cities like Delhi do it cheaper. Ancient systems like London, Paris and Budapest do it cheaper. Shiny modern systems like Singapore do it cheaper. Cold places like Malmo do it cheaper. Hot places like Mexico City do it cheaper.

https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/us-r...
https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2013/06/03/comp...

The question isn't why one specific city is cheaper than NYC. The question is why every single city outside the US is vastly cheaper than NYC. The only place that even comes remotely close to US prices is one line of the London metro.
This coincides with Google's plans to phase out DoD contracts at BD: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/14/technology/google-adds-to-...
Thanks, yes I did (edited)
One doesn't need to run own server, they can use one of the public ones:

https://xmpp.net/directory.php

Similarly how it's done with mail.
Twitter is ruining itself the same way.
Windows 10 Mobile upgrade now available for (some) Windows Phone 8.1 handsets
Ha yep! Before our snapback cache, what you're saying was the solution we kept recommending to folks. We use javascript to make the whole note a clickable target area, not just the hyperlink. And so we had to listen for the ctrl+click events too just to make sure that all worked too.
What I am surprised about most is that Google didn't put BD on the path to make "street-view for the ocean floor" robots.

A literal fleet of robots that could map the ocean BUT also start cataloging all the fish in the ocean.

We talk about seafood collapse, what if there were thousands of robots that would suffice and charge via solar then dive and map and count fish.

That's a fucking vision for robots I would like to see.
They don't have to be more competent if they are cheaper. Assuming that companies always hire the "best" for the job is naive.
> Currently there appears to be no activity around Exclusions.

That's a shame. It seems like a no-brainer to me. With all the semi-useless features out there this one would stand out.
But how do they know it's your phone?
What about Atlas ?

http://www.bostondynamics.com/robot_Atlas.html

EDIT: Also for the Motoman, is it possible it needs so much power because of how fast it can move that 15 kg mass around ? There's no beating conservation of energy.
The Secret Life of a Tech VC and His $10M Infidelity
Tern Water – The Smart Faucet
That's a bizarre stance. It's normal that people don't want to have, say, a brick factory built next to their house because it would impact their psychological well-being.

Trust between members of society, however, is not a matter of individual psychology. It's one of the crucial differences between western countries where you can expect a level of fairness in dealing with strangers, and the third world where you have to rely on your family and clan. It's what enables the markets to work, the justice system, the bureaucracy. Not to mention making living more pleasant.

And anyway, why would the "no Mexicans" policy be OK at a single house level, and not a gated community, city, state, country?
Excellent link!

My engineer Loser brain is about to explode. Those are secrets of management Sociopaths. It's anathema to me, but maybe I'm just Clueless. :)
Dept of Homeland Security Releases 2015 FOIA Annual Report
First, a quick overview on how the landing works. After the first stage separates, it executes a "boostback burn," using the engines to get it moving toward the landing site. Sometime later, it fires the engines again as part of the "reentry burn," which is used to soften the blow of hitting the atmosphere at Mach Whatever. Apparently the rocket exhaust acts a little bit like an ad hoc heat shield, plus it helps slow the thing down. Finally, right as it approaches the landing site, it fires the center engine a final time to, hopefully, bring the rocket to a stop at zero altitude.

The amount of fuel used varies a lot, because they can land in different places. At one extreme, you have a landing at the launch site, which uses the most fuel in order to get the first stage turned around and coming back. Barge landings use less fuel, because they can be positioned under the flight path so the rocket doesn't have to maneuver as much.

SES-9 was at the other extreme. It reserved the bare minimum of fuel for the landing attempt because of its heavy, high-performance payload. That meant no maneuvering boostback burn, no or minimal reentry burn, and the landing burn itself was done with three engines instead of the typical one. That saves fuel because the rocket decelerates faster and spends less time fighting gravity, but of course the control challenge is magnified, which is probably why it went all explodey.

Putting some numbers on it, I found some estimates here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/2vuy1v/how_much_fue...

According to that, landing at the launch site would require about 38 tons of fuel, and a (normal) barge landing would require about 20 tons. SES-9's barge landing would have been even less.

I believe the 15% from your StackExchange link is confused, and someone mistook the payload penalty (about 15% for a barge landing) for the amount of fuel required.
Except you can't compare the health benefits of standing vs sitting by comparing different jobs: those jobs have different salaries, populations, risks, and benefits which all have a say in health. Good luck trying to account for all of that to find causal evidence of sitting/standing's relation to health.
Foreign students being bad at English is a concern - it's a disservice to the international students, teachers, and other students if a substantial subset of students can't participate effectively.
In for example JavaScript or other high level programming language: Instead of implementing type check/hints, your functions should validate the input data and throw an error if it doesn't meet the requirements. The compiler/VM should chose the optimal type. Types are for low level systems programming. In high level programming, think form design and validation instead of types. Example: Argument "yearBorn" should take a numeric value of two or four numbers. Not a "unsigned short int".
Here's another way.

while(true){};
I would identify myself as full stack web developer, but the problems you list (apart from negotiations) sound interesting to me... What does that make me? :)
No its your responsibility to keep encouraging and pushing people even if they're clearly not naturally attuned or have no interest. Then push them towards higher education, where they can spend half a decade of their life and accrue tens of thousands of dollars in debt all to work against the grain of what they're good at and enjoy. Then they can be thrown in the tech interview washing machine cycle which might as well be an IQ test which no amount of education will change, bouncing around until they find a mediocre job they hate or until they ditch the field entirely. More people that slog through a STEM degree are doing completely unrelated work than ever before.
You should look at https://www.pinboard.in/
Hootsuite
Can we save the open web?
And John Kerry was given a gov't BB as secretary of state.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2015/09/30/john-kerr...
Congratulations, Mr. Generation Text. You remember bitching about how all your college speakers are boring squares? You have just ensured that no speaker will ever tell you anything interesting ever again.

Enjoy your milquetoast.
My reaction to CoffeeScript over time:

CoffeeScript is shit, CoffeeScript is ok, CoffeeScript is great, CoffeeScript is ok, CoffeeScript is shit
This is really coincidental.. last night I was sitting at a traffic light looking at my phone and started thinking that google maps data about car traffic would be really good to use to fine tune traffic lights.
Aren't most of those positions typically union jobs?
Spot on. The constant in the equation isn't the number of cars on the road, but the tolerance people have for time spent in traffic.
The cluelessness of this article is beyond words.

New York City has one of the most amazing transit systems of any city in the world, and most of it is at least 100 years old.

By focusing on stops and forgetting to mention the dozens of large projects taking place in the NYC transit system, he makes it sound like nothing is changing.

Here's just a small list off the top of my head:

1. new Penn Station

2. Yes the 7 train to Hudson Yards

3. Yes, the 2d avenue subway (which has been in the offing for 100 years)

4. new East River tunnels

5. new ferry system (including 18 new ferries announced today)

6. new Select Bus Service

7. new New Jersey tunnels

8. repairing East River Bridges

9. new tunnels for LIRR service to Penn Station
A TV network's product is television content, their monetization strategy is advertising. The delivery mechanism is cable / airwaves.

Sure there are secondary economic effects and markets that complicate the picture. But the basic business model of a television network isn't all that different than a regular company that sells their products directly.
They'll do what they did to Wikileaks. The USG phone Visa and MasterCard CEOs and threaten the shit out of them personally. Suddenly you lose the ability to take credit card payments.

You can turn to Bitcoin, but that's like trying to quench the hunger of a million people with one faucet.

Plus if you are an American then it doesn't matter where your servers are hosted. The men in black suits are going to be knocking on your door.
Yes, it's going to be hard to retrofit Python libraries that use this style of parameter passing.

But if you're starting fresh, it's not that hard to use keyword parameters to support a lot of different options while also having reasonable types. (Take a look at how Dart libraries do it.)
Nordics have a leg up on us because they don't spend so much on their militaries and don't have such a diverse electorate to appeal to. The U.S. has them covered to some extent.

Alphabet should be pushing for more efficient governments, with an 's'. Americans need to let the world pony up more for safe international trade, and stop being so damn wasteful with ever increasing taxes and debt. Society will cover you when it's wealthy enough. Got to get there first though.
>I have no doubt that the web will eat desktop application

I hope not.

There's nothing like a well-done desktop GUI EXE for richness of UI / UX. And desktop GUI apps can still connect to back-end services over HTTP or other technologies.
Flask and Pyramid don't help in that situation either...In fact, I switched from Flask (after years of being an avid Flask proponent) because I ran into too many projects that were a mess due to the lack of constraints / standard ways of doing things. After 5 years of solid Django use, I have yet to run into a situation where Django is too inflexible for a client's needs. No, the Admin isn't for everything (and that's even outlined in the docs); but it's not difficult to roll a custom dashboard (just like you would when using Flask or Pyramid).
> C needs to cut down on the instances of undefined behavior

As someone who's worked on compilers a good bit, I disagree (and this is my favorite meme to argue against lately). You need that undefined behavior for performance.

> For instance, if you overflow an integer, the compiler should not be allowed to assume that code branch is unreachable, or to conjure nasal demons.

You need to be careful to not destroy loop trip count detection.

> Instead the result should be an implementation-defined integer

Not good enough. Loop trip count detection destroyed.

> jump to an implementation-defined exception handling routine.

Unacceptable for performance. Probably a 3x loss.
I honestly hope it's the former.
> ...they also get their residential property market going up...

Of all the problems the US faces, excessively _low_ housing costs is not one of them.

Indeed, if the effect would be to raise housing costs then this alone would be a reason to rethink the policy.
"really wish I had the time to learn Clojure."

I would say don't bother. The language is a nice lisp (nice simplifications, great immutable ADTs, edn, pretty good async libs, etc), but the ecosystem tooling is still miserable IMHO - this is coming from someone who has worked around 6-12 months on a couple of clojure projects, so I'm not a die hard expert but I've worked enough with it to build with/have used clojurescript,clojure,java bindings,leiningen/boot,clojars etc.

I really wanted to like clojure. The idea that I could run my code on the JVM and in the browser is alluring. And, I would add, if you like using mvn or ant or gradle or in general the java way of doing things, you will probably think leiningen is good enough.

But I have zero tolerence for annoying/unnecessary headaches, and so I can't take it, and don't program any of my projects in it.

What do I consider good? Well an analogous project is Mix for Erlang/Elixir, and I think its an excellent example of what I wish leiningen were. Anyone can learn Mix in about 10 minutes, you can easily use it for erlang & elixir projects, I have had zero problems and stuff just works. This is not the case with leiningen, which makes building and deployments unnecessarily complicated in clojure.

I don't see clojure getting mainstream until someone starts concentrating more on the user experience in the tooling, though this may be more of a java/jvm originated problem, still it affects your whole experience while using clojure.
So it's basically CAP theorem?
This would never happen from a commercial real estate standpoint. Commercial RE development shapes a lot (all?) of urban areas and the most valuable real estate is almost always in the highest traffic areas. Restaurants want to be at the busiest most congested intersections.
"95% of developers identify as either a Developer, Programmer, Engineer, Senior Developer or Full-Stack Developer. Embedded Application Developers are most likely to identify as Engineers. Graphics Programmers are most likely to identify as Programmers.

But Developer is the runaway choice here. It’s our top choice, too."

Good. This has always been a very silly thing to have to argue about. The people who care a lot about this topic are saying more about themselves by caring so much than any of the above titles would say about what they do.
IMO, the only questionable statement he made is the following:

“The government was not happy with us not bidding that, because they bent over backwards to lean the field to our advantage,”

This is a serious accusation (corruption) and shouldn't be taken lightly and the upper management has every right to fire him for that. Other than that, it's just a harmless case of "drunk words/sober thoughts".
Well, if you think of e.g. Marissa Meyer at Yahoo, big multinationals look like ships with so much momentum even the captain has trouble changing their direction.

Of course, reforming one arm of a business is a lot easier than an entire company, especially if nobody really depends on that arm.
I'm a high school student taking AP CS right now. At least anecdotally, the main problems with the program are curriculum related and instructor related.

The curriculum sadly is very fine-tuned to an obscure Java-dialect created specifically for the course. Though the program does teach basic principals of CS, there's a great deal of time wasted on this weird little platform; obviously, most high school students these days with technical inclinations would rather learn more open and directly applicable platforms to learn.

The even greater problem though stems from the instruction, which I would argue is derived from the aim of the course itself. There's a very heavy focus on teaching to the test, as in the AP system teachers are rewarded for having high-scoring students. This means there's a lot of bland dissemination of facts and non-trivial projects are few and far between.

Overall, as someone who plans to have a career in software, I've been really disappointed with the program. Supposedly there is a program launching in fall 2016 however: https://advancesinap.collegeboard.org/stem/computer-science-...
The annoying thing is that Glass would've still been a great product without the camera. All they needed to do was release a cameraless version first, then evolve from there. But instead they came across as some sort of weird surveillance device - which is a perception that Google is always struggling with.
If you flip the genders, is it misandry?
You won't be able to get ideal statistics this way (any large health study is hard) but you can still do lots to control for these sorts of things. It's not a new need.
Rare form of diabetes may require alternate treatment
This article should just say "do what works for you and keep it to yourself." Why does everyone need to evangelize every single decision?
There are probably a lot of different ways to look at it.

One perspective is that easy problems usually involve convex sets (or minimizing convex functions, which is pretty much the same thing since the solution set is guaranteed to be convex). Discrete sets, such as the vertex set of a hypercube, are trivially non-convex (unless they only contain a single element).

You can also think about it geometrically. Imagine you have a plane that passes through a cube. How do you determine if it intersects one of the cube vertices (this is basically equivalent to the subset sum problem) ? Of course it's easy to find a method that will work in 3D, but these methods all end up scaling exponentially with the dimension of the space.
This. And even if the "average" person in a study works a certain way, you might just be one of the outliers. People vary a lot and you have to figure out what works for you.
I love that the PCAP format has become the defacto standard for analyzer tools to use. I just saw an HN article about a new analyzer based on PCAP.
I'd like a standardised function to clear a block of memory that is guaranteed to not be optimised out, and a constant time compare function.
> The law creates a [...] distinction

Fixed that. Citation needed for the elided segment.

Here's a physical iPhone that is not subject to search.
> I don't know if the compiler implementors would stand for it, though.

I wouldn't without solid proof that performance won't regress.
I have had an adjustable desk (sit or stand) for the past eight years. The biggest benefit in my mind is the variation you get from switching between sitting and standing. Burning calories was never a goal.

I am particularly happy to be able to stand when I feel like it, because I had a pretty severe case of RSI in my arms, and thought that I would not be able to continue to work as a programmer. The biggest help came from using a break program, coupled with an ergonomic keyboard and mouse, but standing also helps.

More details here: http://henrikwarne.com/2012/02/18/how-i-beat-rsi/
Right, roughly what I said in a parallel comment. Good to see others think so too.
> Nobody ever claimed that the one and only benefit of standing is to "burn excess calories".

Well, the article didn't claim that, either. It mentions that as one potential (arguable) benefit. It mentions this in the broader context of standing desk improving health in general, and the fact that there's basically no evidence for this.
Wisp: Whitespace to Lisp
Search is one of Google's products and not all products are sold directly as a revenue source.

A product is anything that can be offered to a market that might satisfy a want or need. That nobody actually pulls out their checkbook and pays for a Google search doesn't mean it's not a product and that there's not a market for search.
Where do the taxpayers get their money from?
NAS that is stupid simple to set up. 99% people don't know how what NAS is...
And also to the students they TA.
I'm unfamiliar with that part of US history, can you provide me with a brief recap (or better yet, a link to an article) explaining how their creditors behaved like vulture funds? (edit: do you mean this? https://history.state.gov/milestones/1784-1800/loans)

This isn't about regular creditors, but about vulture funds, sovereign debt, ruining countries, and the never-ending cycle of incurring even more debt to pay for existing debt.
> Are they more competent than you?

no.[0]

It's purely a money thing. I don't fault our industry, I do fault our government for bending over backward for them. Besides, I'd rather our industry and government focus on filling those classrooms with Americans and hiring Americans first. But it's a self fulfilling prophecy and I just want to start a conversation because I think that this "career" may not be the best if you are at all capable.

[0] http://www.epi.org/publication/bp356-foreign-students-best-b...
This comment.

(That was an insightful article. It was full of insight)
Holy Christ!
That they don't hire the best individual doesn't mean they don't hire the best team. Sometimes the cheap inexperienced developer is the best investment and you are not. In that situation the cheap inexperienced guy deserves the job and you don't.

If the company makes a mistake, that is, they think they need a cheap inexperienced guy when in fact they need a 100% American-born-and-raised engineer, that company will be outcompeted by the ones who better know what they need.
Venezuela had a mostly positive balance of trade last 10 years. So they had enough money to ask for financing for a nuclear plant (usually 5-10bln) to stabilize their grid. Instead they wasted money on the ridiculous gasoline subsidy, creating a huge smuggling industry.
I didn't get much musical training either, but I used to keep myself entertained by replaying entire albums in my head while walking to school. (Probably not very accurately - but still.)

So I think this is very much about how the brain is wired. There's a level beyond which it absolutely isn't learned, either in ability or - more critically - of interest.

Compare with dance, where I had similar problems with memorising moves until I did an extended weekend immersion and broke my brain for a few days. It got easier after that, but I'm still at the slower end of any class.

I'd guess a lot of people on HN have always had a deep fascination with technology. If you have that kind of draw to a subject, you're not going to be stopped by parental disapproval or negative messages from teachers.

Negative messages will make it harder, and lack of resources will certainly kill you more than anything else will.

But the interest has to be there in the first place - not in a "I guess that might be kind of interesting" way, but in the "If I don't do this I'm going to be really fucking unhappy" way.
default windows search. people who never change it because it just works (well enough)
How much energy do you think went into "training" alphago? Not just electricity and server time to train it's neural networks, but the development team too.
I do not care if they are cheaper and younger as long as they are competent. If the standards and the process is the same, they are welcome to learn, assimilate, stay, and earn a living.
Essentially there are two keys used to encrypt data on an iphone - one linked to the hardware (hardcoded and unique to each iphone, cannot be erased) and one linked to the software that's stored in NAND. After N attempts the NAND is erased and the key is lost thus all the data on the device is gone (one could try to brute force using a rainbow table style attack but at this point it's a lost cause because the amount of time it would take to decrypt the device). The NSA uses the old technique of copying this NAND to a backup and restoring it every time the device gets erased. This would give them infinite attempts at cracking the passcode with as little device meddling as possible

edit Apologies forgot to mention the passcode/fingerprint is tied into the 2 key process.