skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This reminds me of those lists, like the Places Rated Almanac (which might be more sophisticated now than it was years ago), where a list of criteria demonstrates that a particular place (in this case the suburbs) is inferior to other places. One can tick off a set of criteria and come up with a score or this case a blog post demonstrating why a place is better than another.

I currently live is the suburbs of a city that wouldn't score high on these kinds of lists, no balanced seasons--practically no winter and no easy access to winter sports, no major league sports team, bad traffic, no major museums, limited cultural opportunities compared to other big cities, escalating real estate prices. These were actual categories in the Places Rated Almanac that would make my city seem to be undesirable.

The problem with this approach and that of the blog "Why Suburbia Sucks" is that everyone weighs the costs and benefits differently. A more realistic title for the blog might be "Why Suburbia Sucks for Me, Right Now". (Or to better suit it's tone, "Why Suburbia Sucks for Me and Why You Should Feel It Sucks Too.) Is there a more objective or comprehensive way to assess Suburbia (or the quality of life in a particular city)?

The answer is yes, simply watch what people do. I live in Austin, the fastest growing city in the US this year according to Forbes and it has been fast growing for many years. Why would people move here when it is so hot, has no major league sports teams, requires a long trip to go skiing or to the beach, and has bad traffic? People move here for a variety of reasons and they keep moving here faster than they move away. Likewise, the suburbs have an appeal that overcomes their disadvantages for other people. Other posters here have already explained some of the important factors that make people want to live in the suburbs.

My problem with the original blog post is that it seems to express a desire to judge and decide what is best for others. Smart people often feel that if only they had there hands on the steering wheel then the world would be a better place. (Maybe they could make it a better place but maybe not.)
Well, to get picky about it, I believe the exception is that it's ok to use it while a non-closed alternative is in the works. I think the example Stallman uses in his talks is that of software controlling a life saving medical device.

Obviously the use case in point doesn't come under that though. :)
That would replace one runway, but it still doesn't compare to the number of planes that the sky can handle. Sky which is cheap/free in comparison to building rails. There is definitely a point where trains are more efficient, particularly between a small number of large cities, but moving a large proportion of US air traffic onto trains, imho, is a different problem given the number of routes (1000s) and airports (100s).

I'd have to see the math, but there is also a question as to carbon emissions per-passenger/distance. I believe that on long flights (more time at high altitude) widebody aircraft might be more fuel efficient than high-speed trains stuck on tracks.
That's an interesting point. There are different ways to look at it. In terms of a huge change in our understanding of the world, I agree. But I think Asimov is thinking in terms of effectiveness of the model in explaining observations and making predictions.

In say 2000 BC, a flat-earth and spherical-earth theory were probably both about the same level of effectiveness in explaining observations and making predictions about new observations. In the year 1800, Newton's mechanics were extremely effective in making correct predictions. As technology advanced and new observations were possible, some gaps were revealed. But even today, Newton's mechanics are extremely effective and accurate for explaining and predicting many observations in our world; just not all of it. Einstein's relativity does a much better job, but also not perfect.

Now again, you can say that there is a huge fundamental difference between the flat-earth and round-earth theories, or between Newton and Einstein, and I agree, but here I think Asimov is just arguing from this "correctness of model in explaining/predicting" perspective.
Neverending Serpent's Chemical Reaction
>373$ and 479$, which might seems a lot but if you move your BTC at the right time you’re not going to lose anything, on the contrary, compared to the fees you would normally pay for Bank transactions, chances are you’re going to spend way much less anyway.

This is INSANE. Justifying monthly 30% swings in the value of your currency with "bank fees suck" is complete nonsense. Currency instability like that destroys economies because people lose the ability to budget and they become fearful.

In the worst periods of inflation in the US, the currency never devalued by 30% in a month. That's Zimbabwe level crazy.

Also, I pay precisely $0 a month in bank fees, as do many other Americans, so that argument would fall flat even if the swings were much smaller.
It must be frustrating for an author to write an article but then to have the editor apply a click-baity title that makes no sense.

Of course Mapcodes can't replace GPS, they tell you where a thing is in relation to other things but not where you are. I know that the yoghurt is near the milk but that doesn't help if I don't know where I am in the shop. I have to ask someone to translate my current position into the same locational namespace and then start to plan a route.

Perhaps they will become useful for stating the location of a destination bit under the covers they will always be translated to a linear coordinate system for navigation.
> Suburbia exists because people want a quiet, relatively safe place for their kids to grow up.

And because it's the only thing affordable. Which does not get mentioned enough.

I would love to put my family in a walkable urban environment. But I don't have a $500k+ housing budget, so anything even remotely urban is completely out of the question, unless it's in the heart of some gangland territory somewhere.
Yes, i think a "smart-contract" would do the trick.. with the plus you could define more arbitrary parameters, to model some context that fits your need.

But the coin blockchain would at least to have a little context about the second one, the "smart contract" one.. binding/linking the transactions in the second blockchain to itself.
Search was speedy enough for me, 1 second at worst, no complaints here.
Really? You think if I recommend emacs to someone using IE6 and they go view the site and it fails to display, that will somehow make them 'see the light'? I suspect the complete opposite is true and, hence, why gnu support browsers that aren't 100% GPLed.
I hate the monorail at EWR with a passion - the slow speed, the long stop at a parking garage before the terminal, the insane loop round some kind of junkyard/parking lot it takes on the way to the railroad station, but all told it's still only about 10 minutes at worst.
Cool, thanks for the quick response!
The smell?

My main memories of visiting Venice (20 years ago...) were also: general lack of greenery, not many open spaces, and a pervasive delapidated shabbiness. Also, it's built on marshland. So I'm not sure the good city planning bit applies either ;)

Also, constant churn of tourists... not sure how I'd feel about that as a parent. But if I had one of those grand Venetian apartments I might be OK about living there as an adult. The lack of greenery might end up a bit trying however.
Sure, the rules aren't beautiful, the theory that's entirely emergent is.
Thread from a programming perspective is pretty much anything, that shares memory and has an implicit context switching. Which is very different from other, mostly event-loop based, concepts, that don't give up control implicitly. It is very important not to mix them. Even something that looks like a thread, but can only switch context when there is a special keyword, is not a thread anymore, and unlike a thread is very precise of what can and cannot be executed out of order and access memory willy-nilly. I actually implemented a C-dialect DSL once, that did basically this, i.e. added to C reenterable functions with heap allocated context and an event loop to run them. I eventually abandoned the project and the idea, as synchronous code isn't that good to work with. Even Erlang's "synchronous" processes receive messages in an event driven fashion.

I think you didn't have a pleasure to work with event loops in languages with first-class functions, that's why you think they are on the same boat with green thread. They are not, of course. There are no trade-offs. You have multiple scopes to share memory from, one for each handler, that can execute only atomically, one for all handlers created by that function, that may execute out of order, and a global scope of course. You can compose functions, give them names and what not. You can even have a console, like Erlang does.

I've tried like a dozen of concurrency models, you cannot really convince me, that threads are any good for that.
Apple Hires Key Google Vehicle Charging Engineer
He will more likely beat them to death.
My browser hangs for ten seconds as soon as I try to load the page, followed by an unresponsive script error.

I'm on a pretty anemic computer, but there's got to be a way to keep my browser responsive while it loads in everything it needs.
That's not the "only point" of this journal.

From http://joss.theoj.org/about:

We built this journal because we believe that after you've done the hard work of writing great software, it shouldn't take weeks and months to write a paper about your work.

and from the original post:

If an author of research software is interested in writing a paper describing their work then there are a number of journals such as Journal of Open Research Software and SoftwareX dedicated to reviewing such papers. In addition, professional societies such as the American Astronomical Society have explicitly stated that software papers are welcome in their journals. In most cases though, submissions to these journals are full-length papers that conflate two things: 1) A description of the software and 2) Some novel research results generated using the software.

> Also, a paper is inherently different from a piece of open source software - a paper is set to present facts about something observed in nature; software on the other hand is used to accomplish something.

Curious how you think that this journal won't do this. I'm curious what you think of the Journal of Mathematical Logic!
There is always a way. However, taking care of the environment would add expenses to the production process and, as a result, the cost of the pair of jean would have to increase, as would the price. Once that happens, we would then skip that environment-conscious product for one that did not have that cost embedded.

I was reading an article about the price competition in airlines. People would spend 30 minutes looking for a better deal, to get a flight that would be $5 cheaper.

If we do that for a product that basically flies you through space, imagine what you would do with a product that is disposable.

I guess the hypocrisy is that we don't want to talk about that issue. We would rather not have immigrants picking tomatoes, or sewing jeans. We can always just transfer that production to China, where the environmental and human effects are invisible to us.
Ummm...guns are nowhere near the #2 killer of children in the US. Where did you even find get a stat like that? I'm looking and can't find anything that even resembles it anywhere.

Here are the top 3 by age group: https://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/001915.htm
There are plenty of places where the pitifully bad systems that already exist are not just used, but used to well beyond their capacity.

Like... SF and environs, where the rail-based transit systems are basically all running hobbled all the time due to being way over capacity and way past expected lifetime of equipment. Caltrain just reported weekday ridership is now around 62,000, for example, but is struggling to replace 25-year-old equipment that breaks down on an almost weekly basis.
Did it ever?
I suspect many English signs in Asian countries which use incorrect grammar, including slogans on T-shirts, have had input by foreigners here being mischievous. I particularly remember "No coming on the grass" as an English translation for "Don't walk on the grass" on signs in a park in China 10 years ago, and wondered if the translation had gone through some QA by a native English speaker.
> It would be really good if gwt,doppio,teavm all agreed on a single api facade for targeting the browser API.

Unfortunately, that is impossible due to differing requirements; I've actually talked with the teavm and bck2brwsr folks [0]. Doppio requires asynchronous function calls to support preemptive multithreading. TeaVM, GWT, and bck2brwsr all map Java methods directly to synchronous JavaScript methods, preventing them from supporting multithreading.

This is actually one of the larger differences we describe in the academic paper that sets Doppio apart from those projects and Emscripten [1].

[0] Start of the conversation: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/plasma-umass-gsoc/uuZk09CGIM...

[1] PLDI 2014 paper (Sorry, I know I'm linking this a lot in the comments thread, but I promise it's a fun read!): https://plasma-umass.github.io/doppio-demo/paper.pdf
Saying London is Europe is like saying NYC or SF is the US. These cities are extreme exceptions to the rules.
Middle-Class Families Feel More Squeezed by Rising U.S. Rents
Ask HN: What kind of shape are the derivatives of OpenSolaris in?
What's the current shape of the OpenSolaris forks (Illumos, OpenIndiana etc)? I don't hear much talk about any of them on this site. Are we missing out?

(I enjoyed OpenSolaris when I used it for a while in 2009, but I gave up when Oracle took it over. I'd love to know what has happened to it since then.)
With Bitcoin cash wouldn't be so cheaply available to the selected few. Gentrification means that the demand for urban space is growing. The huge inflation in fiat supply means that more fiat can be spent on buying urban buildings and assets (and stopping urban development). The natural reaction way would be to build Skyscrapers in every city (and blend it somehow nicely with the cities)
You're right, making the entire comparison pretty pointless from the start, hence my original point, lol at calling the north side risky.
Cassandra is not a solid solution.

After problems with a node, often the management tools cause additional problems.

I suggest anybody follow the cassandra-users list for a while before committing to it.
... this is another way that parochial land-use policies that inhibit supply growth harm people and the country as a whole: http://jakeseliger.com/2015/09/24/do-millennials-have-a-futu....
Why isn't http caching sufficient?
Minneapolis also isn't what it was 20 years ago. I grew up on the Northside, and it was a pretty economically depressed area still on the decline swing of things. This included most portions of NorthEast as well.

I'm glad I had the experience, but today the community is far more vibrant. I think you will see those rent/home prices invert rather rapidly as the current first time home buyer generation starts to realize Minneapolis is not the Minneapolis of their parents.

I also completely agree re: the soul-soucking nature of Minneapolis suburbia though. Can't imagine a more horrid place for mental health.
The Classified Home Movies of Guantanamo Bay
Keep in mind that the vast majority of clothing is not sold at retail prices (and some of it is not sold ever). It depends on the brand, but maybe %20 is a good ballpark.

Also, there are development costs, etc.

Finally, the manufacturer isn't seeing $200. They only get the wholesale price (if they are lucky), or a percentage after the sale. With factories often needing payment upfront, and the brand not making money until after a sale occurs (if ever), there is a lot of risk that needs to be priced into the product.
Looks nice, but having a 1.1MB webpage with 7 different fonts seems somewhat wrong to me... We should start thinking about mobile clients who have to pay these MB.
I don't know exactly where the hard parts (cabin) of the Tesla begin and end but it's possible to have enough energy to just barrel right through the crumple zone.

Crumple zones are directional, when you tweak them they lose effectiveness in their primary direction, that's part of why modern cars get totaled by less damage (your insurance doesn't want to pay big $ for medical when you crash again, with less effective crumple zones). The #1 purpose is to buy time for the airbag to explode before the occupant's faces are occupying the area it takes up once inflated. Acting as an energy absorbing barrier is second priority. It's perfectly possible to hit something hard enough that you only get the first functionality out of it. e.g you hit a brick wall so hard that the "oh the front of the car stopped quick, better explode now" logic has time to happen. Even at 100+mph, the time it takes to drive 4ft (the length of the hood) there's plenty of time for the airbag to explode. However, if the car is moving fast enough the "crumple zone" won't slow the car considerably. Imagine the difference between falling out of a second story window into a (freshly plowed) snow bank vs falling out off the empire state building into the same snow bank, sure it still decelerates you but not enough to matter. Based on the spot where the car wend airborne, it wouldn't surprise me if the crumple zone was tweaked making it easier to completely go though.
Ok, the time period was just arbitrary.. the most important part of the idea, being a second blockchain to have programmable parameters specifying certain conditions to the first blockchain..

So i dont know what parameters would be the best giving a certain context..
I don't want to overstep, but I'm curious what part of Austin you are describing. I can't think of any place that is largely undeveloped but is a 2-3 minute drive from a museum.
Seriously? Most late-20th century American subdivisions are built on the scale of a section, which is a mile on each side. Each section typically has a strip-mall type car-centered shopping area with a grocery store at one corner. Due to the fractal layout of the dead-end streets and lack of walking facilities it is generally at least a mile from any of the houses to any of the grocers. And that's for th people who are willing to walk down the side of a giant street-cross-freeway without sidewalks.
Nobody is saying that it is practical, but GNU aren't known to make their stance on practicalities alone. GNU are known for their ideological purity, and a lot of people (some even quite grudgingly) admire them for their consistent stance.
Can you elaborate on what checks Perl6 permits programmers to ask for?
I agree with what you (and the others) say.

Regarding green threads and state machines I would however add that while green threads allow to ditch some state machines (e.g. ones that wait until a complete packet was received) you won't get rid of all of them, e.g. you will still need state machines for lots of protocol implementations. E.g. if you are implementing the websocket protocol or HTTP/2, you have some interaction between incoming data, data that must be sent out and requests from the [library] user. The state of the connection depends on all of these, so you need some kind of connection state machine which would run most likely in it's own green thread (in addition to a sending thread and a receiving thread and a user thread). And now you have to implement clean synchronization between all of those threads. The lack of necessary synchronization (and the ability to observe a huge amount of state at once without danger) can make the implementation a little bit more easy in my experience. But here I also have to agree with strmpnk that a good design is necessary for both approaches, and accessing lots of shared mutable data in multiple callbacks is probably also not the cleanest approach.
Surprising, no. Surprising to see it in writing from the FBI? Yeah, a little.
The NHTSA has a few videos showing exactly this.
Works for me, but it's slow
Don't forget that US is really big and has lots of different types of suburbs. For example, Chicago has quite a few dense walkable suburbs with easy access to public transport
Having Java's powerful multithreading constructs available in the browser is a pretty big deal, I think.
I should have qualified with "#2 cause of accidental death."

And as your link shows, "accidental death" is the #1 overall cause of death for children.

So it's the #2 category of the #1 category of risk.
Also let's not forget regulation (even good regulation) is expensive to follow.
Two-Thirds Of Americans SAID THEY Would Utilize High-Speed Rail If It Was Available
Amazing, isn't it? In a country where we are told is all about choice and having it our way, we're put in so many situations where we have diametrically opposite and equally unappealing choices, the tyranny of OR, instead of room for compromise.
SF rail transit is very good by US standards. The system is old and worn out, but it takes you where you want to go in a reasonable amount of time. Which is, after all, the point.
They have one of those at SFO also and it's not exactly fast. That said, it's a big improvement over the prior shuttle bus to the rental car center--though the BART connection I usually just take that if I'm going into the city in the vicinity of the convention center.
Ask HN: Who are some writers/thinkers similar to Paul Graham and Sam Altman?
I gain a lot of insight on the technology world reading from the writings (essays, blog posts) of Paul Graham and Sam Altman. However, I would like to increase my limited scope.

Irrespective of viewpoint, who are some people that think and write in a similar style, and on similar topics?
Yeah this is a misleading title. Title should be:
"Should Mapcodes Replace Addresses"
I agree. I live in suburbia and I feel like I'm slowly choked out of my humanity. Can't wait to move to a damn city or somewhere with more density. America's suburbia was designed for cars and cars only.

Here's an anecdote. My little brother has after school band practice 30 mins drive away. What does he do after school? He can't walk home, so he has to wait for me to pick him up. He can't go out to a movie with his friends because it would involved several parents taking the time out of work to send his friends there, and pick them up. He can't walk home or ride the subway because it's a freaking sprawl of highways. Bus stations are few and far between, and hugely unreliable. Instead all he knows is the highway that connects the school to home, and relies on my driving instead of his own two legs to get him home. I wonder why Americans are obese, hmm.

I watch animes that depict life in Tokyo. There is never a car involved. Kids just walk home after school, walking to a restaurant with their friends if they feel like it, hitting up a local 7-11. They can explore the local park, go to the movie theater, walk home with their friends if its on the same way.

I've stayed in Paris for 2 weeks and could literally walk everywhere. It's amazing how good it feels to see a cool gelato shop in yelp, proceed to take the subway with a bunch of strangers, walk a bit to the gelato shop, buy my gelato, and sit in a nearby coffee shop eating it. And want to check out some comic books? There's a comic book shop around a mile away, let's walk there.

People were not meant to live in suburbia. We are a social creature, we need to belong in a tribe, not a single home separate from the world.
Why not just "fabricating evidence"?
Looks good in eww!

http://i.imgur.com/5mLJdXb.jpg