skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
By and large rail freight in the US is a rather profitable business and significantly more efficient than trucks for the routes and cargo where it makes sense. [1]

As for getting passenger rail back up to its original speed, I'd have to be convinced that (modulo the delays that can occur due to sharing rails with freight) that it's a lot slower than it once was. For example, the Twentieth Century from NY to Chicago took about 16 hours (per the song) and takes about the same length of time today.

How many people are going to take a 16 hour train from NY to Chicago when they can fly in a few hours? Maybe you and/or a few others who will do it now and then for the experience, but pretty much none of the business travelers who are the bread and butter of most routes would. Heck, cut it to 8 hours and, still, very few would take it.

The rail service was never all that fast over long distances. There just weren't any reasonable alternatives.

ADD: This isn't unique to the US BTW. I've looked at European routes like Dusseldorf to Paris and it turned out it made far more sense to fly.

[1] http://fortune.com/2015/06/04/union-pacific-railroad/
Introducing Distributed Transaction Tracing for Microservices Monitoring
> it still sounds like a legitimate suicide note

"Sounds". Let's not forget the guy's a con man.
Note that the tests are for R7RS. R7RS is still in standardization [public review milestone for 2012 has not yet been met].
This made me smile. I remember trying to learn coding at 6 or 7 from my Tandy 56K Basic manual. I didn't get it but I tried all the same. It would have been cool to have someone there to help me understand.

It's a fortunate thing to have common interests with your child. I can't wait to have my daughters show even the slightest interest in coding. They are toddlers, so I have to just wait.
Rupy can switch code on the fly, meaning you can have users hitting your server and they will run the old code one request and new code the next. No other system I know of works like this, hot-deploying on a remote machine over HTTP seamlessly. Maybe erlang can do it but then again I can't write a 3D game in that language so Java still has the upper hand for my requirements.
The incredible thing is that the cascadia subduction zone is also locked, and past the average interval for moving. How unfortunate would it be if the entire west coast unlocked at the same time?
Extreme YAGNI: How BDD nails your prototyping stage
do you have a link to the previous discussion, please?
Making a music album with Haskell
Beyond the specifics on how websites are actually implemented, what's most important are the "soft skills", aka the people skills. Tech moves forward all the time but sitting down and interacting with a client to grok exactly what they're looking for in order to deliver ahead of schedule and below budget is what will make you stand out in a crowded space.
translations are always problematic. I assure you I didn't ignore those words though. I may, however, be a poor translator. Or you may be a poor reader. Or both. Those weren't "basically random meanings" or "whatever I think of first" though.
Yeah you can't really be patronizing to people who prefer Apple products when you're contrasting a consumer tech company with a genocidal fascist regime.
This seems appropriate: http://xkcd.com/463/
I believe those are supposed to represent votes for Yea, Nay, Abstain...
There are many Indian consulting/vendor shops out there that flout many H1B rules. 1. They take H1B filing fee from employee. 2. They keep you on bench. if you have no job, the consulting firm will run a dummy payroll for you to maintain legal visa status and you have to pay back payroll taxes to them to make up for their loss. 3. Most of the time they will not have a job before hand as required by H1B programme. They will hire some one, keep them on payroll(point 2 above) and then start the search for a contractor work from their clients.

There is lot of fraud going on there. I would say about 50% of H1B visas go to these scams. Ask any Indians working on big companies and they can explain you the bigger picture. Its pathetic that DHS/USCIS are unaware of these widespread scams.
Improve scroll performance with intersection Observer
SPIRV-Cross: Vulkan SPIRV to readable GLSL, etc. (no HLSL at this point sadly)
You're assuming people are rational beings. Most evidence is to the contrary with beliefs passed down generations and many decisions intuitive with its mechanisms varying. There's also rational thought but makes up little of most people's day as intuition suffices. Also, there's documented biases in human mind that apply here:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/11/perceived_ris...

The one-off event of rain forming becomes the story that everyone remembers most and is passed down with dogma. It gets lots of momentum. Day-by-day data generated for years and analytically processed isn't quite memorable. This is same reason people are more afraid of airplanes despite cars killing more. More relevant, it's the same kinds of bias that makes people think they'll win it big in the lottery despite all evidence to the contrary. I've walked in on 50yd lines when PowerBall is up. They'll always say "But such and such up North won $100mil. You never know. It can't hurt to try."

Illogical as hell given that time and money could produce real benefit with high certainty. Yet, they continue doing it to try to re-create that one-off moment someone else experienced. And then someone else experienced it again. :)
Yes, I've been stung with these sort of charges myself in the past here in the UK - the banking code has cleaned up this practice a bit in more recent times; however I think it's fair to say there's a material difference between being stung for £200 and having your house being ripped from under you by sharp banking practice. I recommend watching the film "99 homes" - it's not a perfect film by any means but illustrates many of the coal face issues of mortgage repossession in the US.
The Pareto principle applies to a lot of Machine Learning projects. You can get surprisingly far with very simple heuristics. OP can probably tune something that works well for him. Making it work at scale for a massively different demographic is harder.

SOURCE: I work in Spotify doing music recs.
So, long term, every sizable company moves or merges to get a preferred tax rate, while smaller companies who don't have the clout to stiff their local tax base pay the full rate? I wonder how this doesn't add up to a competitive disadvantage? Couldn't small business owners do something collectively about this screwjob?
all visa holders pay all taxes. we even pay social security which we are not entitled to unless we become permanent residents.
Four domestic cycles, so far. Which comprise dozens or hundreds of individual elections, depending on how you count.

Internationally I believe he's been pretty off the mark, though.
In my experience, Apple is the living embodiment of The Hitchhiker's Guide's "things that cannot possibly go wrong".

> The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.

They might be slightly more reliable in their most standard use case, but you're doomed at the smallest hiccup.
- At least in computer science, it's generally professors who organise the peer review (the Program Commitee)

- I've heard from several collegues that the editor introduced spelling mistakes. Sure, overall they might get some errors out, but a spellcheck is not needed.

- Well yes. But there is no need for that to be expensive.

- Do we need them for this? If there really is fraud, previous cases show it's their university that starts an investigation. I'm not sure if the effect of retracting a paper is that significant..

- If all papers were public in the first place, there is no need to contact someone if it's okay to reuse material.

Anyway publishers might provide some value, but not enough to demand we pay for every single paper, or pay costly subscriptions. They need to die already or adept.
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20061101-03/?p=...

I often find myself saying, “I bet somebody got a really nice bonus for that feature.”

“That feature” is something aggressively user-hostile . . .
If this is a classified government project of some sort (and again, I have zero proof of that, it just "seems" that way), then we _might_ know in, like, 100 years, perhaps. Depends on what country/agency is behind it.
Thanks for the confirmation. I've been weighing my options between Apple Music and Spotify Premium and that makes up my mind. iTunes is enough of a pain in the ass without worrying about whether it'll delete my music collection.

The 3-month premium promotion that Spotify is running doesn't hurt either.
Lower taxes, but also lower needs for spending due to lower population.

There is an argument that attracting company's that compensate well has a net positive impact. But, it takes a lot of of people to make up for these costs. If you assume an extra ~3,000$ per person per year over the areas average that's 230,000 workers which seems unlikely.

Remember everyone involved wants to make this seem like a great thing. But, even negative sum games can make someone rich.
Binary search is an example of a O(log N) algorithm, as OP said. Having tangible examples is great for explaining algorithmic complexity to people.

One I've used is sorting with a deck of cards. Take a single suit, A-K, and have people sort it using bubble or insertion or other sorts. It's only 13 cards, but the difference even between some of the O(n^2) algorithms becomes obvious when swapping is postponed until the latest stage versus earliest.

Then you can also demonstrate radix sort. One of the most underrated sorting algorithms, in my opinion. A lot of people focus on the (potentially) large constant. But it can be appropriate, or may be reduced depending on your use-case. And it's a fantastic sort when you can't give a neat numeric quality for sorting and have to sort over multiple dimensions. Again with cards, you can do two passes. One with buckets by value, and one with buckets by suit. After the second, you collect each of the 4 stacks and the deck is sorted.

Cards, phone books, recipes, these are things that most people encounter (ok, maybe not phone books anymore), in their lives. They offer great aids to demonstrating CS concepts to either new students or people who have only a passing curiosity (or none but they shouldn't have asked :P).
That is true, but then they should have made a control test where they give complicated but true sentences to the same people, checking if they obey to the authority of the language as well. In that case they are not susceptible to bullshit, but merely have given up on 'elite' discussions. Which might both explain voting for Trump and working in Mechanical Turk.
Agreed – I had a Lumia that I really loved, but there was a lack of direction for the platform and severely lacking app ecosystem that ultimately brought me back to an iPhone.
The Sacred Grain of the Northwoods
"Proven safe" is a very high bar.

Is alcohol, high-fructose corn syrup, or grilled red meat "proven safe"?
I like a lot of what Apple does. I love their computers and phones. I've posted here numerous times about that.

But I have not turned on Apple Music, or iCloud Photos, for this very reason. Cloud syncing services are a DISASTER for Apple.

I recently bought my wife an iPhone SE, and upgraded some older computers to El Cap--fresh install + migrate files so I could get a clean start. But turning on the cloud services, and configuring them to do what I expect, was so complicated and scary that I just gave up. I'm syncing Safari bookmarks and Notes, and that's it.

And even the Notes are a mess. I'm stuck with separate local and iCloud folders of notes, because I simply don't trust Apple to not screw up or delete my local notes in the course of trying to sync them.

Rule #1, #2, #3 of cloud syncing should be "do no harm." DropBox has largely figured this out. Apple has not.

It's funny to think back to when Steve Jobs said that DropBox is a feature, not a business. Well, it's a feature I use and happily pay for, and it's a feature that Apple has yet to figure out.
Molecular Cryptography
Yes, but only about 2% have a significant ancestry in the Americas back more than 500 years. Relative to most of the rest of the world, almost all Americans are newcomers.
Debian and other distros also support these architectures.
Also, as others (maybe you, elsewhere?) have pointed out, it would have been a good experiment (!) to take Maciej on despite the initial cold feeling just to see what happened. Maybe it would have worked out! Maybe that would be a lesson about relying on vague gut feels!
For anyone looking for the correct link, here it is : https://www.justice.gov/crt/office-special-counsel-immigrati...
TL;DR but it reminds me of Awk...
> It would probably be nicer to have two compilation artifacts, the extracted human-readable interface part and the object-file implementation part.

Oberon implementations traditionally generates symbol files, that while I believe they are usually binary tends to have tools to generate textual representations, and there are plenty of tools to generate versions of the modules with implementations stripped as well. To compile a module you should need only the symbol files of the modules you import, not the compiled modules themselves.
It's quite telling that you don't want me to speak for other people but just in your answer before projected your irrational feelings about bitcoin on me and on what I feel or don't feel for bitcoin (so that we get straight, I don't "feel" anything for a technology, that doesn't make sense).

When I referred the world at large, I referred the world at large that already knows bitcoin, not the world population. And from those, most of them obviously didn't get in bitcoin (in fact the ones that did get in bitcoin are pulling out as can be clearly seen in the volume of bitcoin transactions since 2014).

And it is a clearly failed financial experiment because:

1 - It concentrated all the wealth in the hands and very few people in only a couple of years (http://www.bitcoinrichlist.com/top100)

2 - The majority of bitcoin transactions are used for ilegal purposes (http://www.coindesk.com/dark-web-markets-processed-more-bitc...)

3 - It's more inconvenient than existing payment systems to use so people don't use it (http://finance.yahoo.com/news/bitcoin-is-dead-says-prominent...)

4 - People are so uninterested and suspicious of bitcoin that you actually loose money if you present bitcoin as a payment/donation method (http://bitcoinist.net/mozilla-study-shows-bitcoin-negative-i...)

5 - Complete unregulation keeps meaning high scale theft and complete unreliability of bitcoin markets (MtGox and many others)

All in all, the world at large - in this case not only the ones that know bitcoin - clearly understands that the financial system needs more regulation not less, and yet, you put bitcoin in the table with is utter lack of regulation and try to claim its a great thing that will solve the world's financial problems but you don't give absolutely no sane argument or metrics about how it is doing that. And that was exactly my original point.
I think on the whole you'd obviously rather have this capability than not, and in the hands of developers interesting stuff will happen.

But I chuckled a little thinking back to all the Fitts's Law discussions that used to go on about the Mac versus Windows menus - on the Mac, the hit area is higher because you can just hit the top of the screen with your mouse. On Windows, it was always lower, because you had to aim below the title bar. This reminded me a bit of that - full fledged touches are dead easy to get right, hovering slightly less so. So I'd hope if this makes it into the final platform (or inevitably gets copied) that there's a lot of guidance to developers to use it only for enhancing existing gestures, instead of making it a primary mode of interaction.
Doesn't that defeat the purpose of having a finite quantity in the first place?
An H1-B is not a path to permanent residence. Having an H1-B does not help in any way with getting a green card. If you apply through employment the sponsoring company does not get any fee reduction, the application is not processed any faster. This is a completely independent petition.

The only way you could say an H1B is a path to immigration is for the case where a non-immigrant meets a spouse and get a green card through marriage. That's what happened to me, but this is really just by accident. Someone under a student visa could experience the same outcome for example.

You sait it yourself, the power of companies over H1Bs is overwhelming. Upon termination, an H1B has to leave the country in the following 24 hours, there is no "grace period" even though it's a widespread myth.
Tesla “hell-bent on being the world’s best manufacturer“ after $283m loss
"Are you susceptible to bullshit if it agrees with your priors?"
>By one estimate, the health care costs of obesity are responsible for nearly 21 percent of total health care spending in the U.S.

BigO has nothing to do with performance even though that what we most use it for.

Its simply a classification of growth characteristics, relationship between two functions.
A Review of Natural Language APIs for Bots
Apple issues Xcode security update
We're an anarcho-syndicalist commune. We take it in turns to act as a sort of 'Satoshi Nakamoto' for the week.
But all the decision of that Satoshi have to be ratified at a special biweekly meeting.
Of course an O(N) method will beat an O(NlgN) method, because O(N) < O(NlgN).

Radix sort is a linear time sort because the hardware (random access memory) is built to allow constant-time lookup of memory. Radix sort wouldn't be linear time on a sequential access memory system, like tape, but merge sort would still be O(NlgN) on such a system.
Snowden was a favorite to be screened at the Cannes Film Festival at an early Out of Competition slot. Stone himself requested an early slot. In the end he didn't get it, so this is a hint that the movie lacks something.

On the other side Laura Poitras new Assange documentary "Risk" screens in the Quinzaine (Directors fortnight) competition.
Announcement: Promising startup Meemim accepts second seed funding offer
Slaves were, and are, born into poverty, often forcibly removed from their parents, treated and sold like cattle, worked hard at all times for no benefit to themselves, had no rights and no legal protections, and had no prospect of removing themselves from slavery. In no way is this comparable to receiving a relatively high quality education during the formative years of your life.

Teachers work hard for little reward to provide the education they give and it is a slap in their face, the faces of the descendants of real slaves, and the real slaves that continue to exist today, to imply that the good work they do is equivalent to what slave owners and masters did to their victims. The analogy to slavery is disgusting and juvenile and it's ludicrous that I had to explain this to you.
He did also provide an earlier link to all the Apply HN submissions (not his alone).
Try just walking into a telephone company like ATT or BT building unannounced and you will be escorted out even assuming you can get past the turnstiles, Exchanges (Central Offices) have even stricter security.
I'm specifically interested here in what the tool cannot do, more than what it can do. For now all I can tell is it "works for some empirical cases, and maybe works in rest of cases, but not strictly defined, don't expect anything concrete".
>>Does this not enrage people? Elsevier and closed-access journals like them, are doing all they can to impede human progress while leaching off of tax-payer dollars to do so. Something should be done to make what Elsevier and the like do illegal, are there any groups/political parties/etc going after them?

This does enrage many people, but one feels somewhat helpless here. But we can surely raise a hue and cry over the internet/emails/whatsapp/social media etc. Let more and more of the scientific community know about the existence of sci-hub and let these scum publishers bleed to death.
Political parties may not want to disturb their money-givers though.
> You weren't turning the knobs to see what would change. The outcome was clear, you didn't like it, and so you prevented it from happening.

Yes. I wasn't arguing against that.
The ‘Flight of the Navigator’ kid robbed a bank
Wow... good job man. My first experience with programming was QBasic, and that was about 16 years ago. I only did it for a couple of weeks but when I picked up on programming several years later as a young adult, it all came back to me - assigning variables from user inputs, printing on screen, if then else, all the basics. Good stuff!
Natural Mosquito Repellent for Zika Virus
Artists vs. YouTube: A Billboard Overview
You Can Reach Software Delivery Nirvana
Re. the former, I would start by reading e.g. http://idlewords.com/2015/11/the_advertising_bubble.htm and http://idlewords.com/talks/internet_with_a_human_face.htm
This part at least has been a configurable option as long as I can remember. http://www.usbdacs.com/Macintosh/files/page5_5.jpg
Did something change? Because the iTunes internal organization for music at least is quite easy to understand.

From the library folder:

Music/Artist/Album/Track# Title.ext

If your files aren't tagged correctly (which is distressingly common), then the auto organization will make a pig's breakfast of your library.

A common example: "Artist" and "Album Artist" are two different ID3 fields - if you have an album with an Album Artist but a blank Artist, iTunes will catalog it as "Unknown Artist" when the consolidation happens.

This is slightly annoying to fix, but the mass tag editor in iTunes works well.
For me 100% of the enjoyment of driving is from getting somewhere that I want to be. If I could get away with never touching a steering wheel again, I would.
They wouldn't have to physically move. Only legally. It'd be easy enough for them to arrange so that the corporate entity in Cupertino is a subsidiary which only ever makes a loss. No profits, no tax for Chang.

Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple is already structured this way.
I am confused. Most things in this article talk about tobacco products, but many e-juice and e-cig products actually do not contain tobacco, though they do contain nicotine. Is this just failure on the author's part, or is this bill not really going to affect e-cigs afterall?
As a parent, let me say that your seven year old isn't a reliable narrator.
Why exactly was a New York court able to issue an injunction for a ".io" domain?

It is a British Territory extension being managed by "Internet Computer Bureau Ltd" based in the United Kingdom.
Looks like someone finally got it to the front page:

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=rob-bell.net
I recently spent a good chunk of a day troubleshooting the problem "when certain people message my account on Apple Mail, I get the message twice."

Confirmed that it wasn't user error, and was common, never made got another inch of headway. My eventual diagnosis was "at least you're getting the message!"
Yes, the H1B prospects will no doubt use their incredible market position and bargaining power to avoid these employers.
Wav is (normally, unless already corrupted) an uncompressed, lossless, audio format. The OP's statement was a little off, but the premise is correct.

Mp3 is lossy. Many audiophiles and audio engineers argue that Mp3 actually sounds better (the compression gives the drums a "crunch" not normally present), but the point is you can go from WAV to Mp3, but you can't go back the other way around. Apple is irrevocably damaging some of his files.
But when can we get a POWER workstation for a reasonable price?