skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My father told me a story about discontinuing a street car line (called an interurban) in a town North of Detroit. There was a hearing at city hall and hundreds of villagers turned out.

Dozens of people made the case to keep the line. Finally the street car company's lawyer got up and made the business case for discontinuing the line. He concluded by asking the crowd how many of you used our company's street car to get to this meeting? Not a single hand went up.

It's easy to tell a pollster you're for high speed rail but how many will actually buy a ticket? Perhaps they should ask for them to prepay for a ticket?
AI-On-A-Chip Soon Will Make Phones, Drones and More a Lot Smarter
>For trust you can walk right in and speak to the manager.

His point with BTC was that you didn't even have to trust some manager.

>However there's nothing really new in these fears (especially after 1929). The solution has always been to keep your money locked up in a safe. Pay for things in cash or cashiers check.

How do you pay with cash online?
Because the "no black people" limit is abusive, in large part intended to be abusive, and has no good-faith public policy purpose, and the other limits can't be described that way.

You can describe them as erroneous or ineffective --- the way you could describe virtually any regulation --- but you can't make that argument about them.

Since this distinction seems pretty obvious, I have to wonder why you'd pretend not to see it.
Likewise, bike users are tired of paying for either 12 feet lanes, the war that petrol-dependent citizen make in Irak, or their contribution to global warming.
Maybe I need to take off my tin-foil hat - but I think this reads exactly as if somebody paid the newspaper to write a story about the "failure of mass transit", and the writers/editors snuck in this graph as a hidden message.
Ah yes, for all of the not noticeable unless you're a multi-millionaire heavily invested in US Treasury bonds effect that is having on him.
Out of curiosity - per day or week: how many people ride the DC Metro, how many people die on the Metro, how many people drive, and how many people die driving? Metro services have the same issue as airlines in that a non-issue failure rate ends up reviled in the news because there's the same name attached to every single incident and everybody is completely failing to group up the alternatives to examine them.

Bad service I can agree with - that's something that needs to be fixed. More money, supportive legislation that makes it easier for them to acquire capability, etcetera. But unless the Metro is killing someone literally every day I doubt its fatality rate approaches cars.
It helps that their primary competitors are explicitly about selling ads.

Palantir can at least pretend that your work will be "changing the world" since they do have some government and NGO projects with real impacts. Of course, only a very small select few will work on those projects—not that they mention that in recruiting.
We are currently experimenting with other strange interchange designs in America. I present to you the diverging diamond:

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

We have one near where I live that opened a few months ago. There appears to be an adjustment period for our drivers. I have spoken to people who drive the diverging diamond near us on a daily basis and they say at least once a week a motorist who is not used to switching from the right to the left hand side of the road goes the wrong way, risking a head-on collision with oncoming traffic.
Possibly more frequent, though neither of us have data. Driving at too high a cruising speed to have adequate reaction time is common, I've never known anyone to crash a car because they lost control during acceleration (motorcycles yes). In contrast, based on my admittedly anecdotal experiences, it's common to accelerate to avoid someone who, for instance, ran a red light or stop sign.
> it's controversial because it's partially financed with taxpayer money whether you use it or not.

This is true of every form of transportation. It's just that motorists are frequently unaware of how their preferred mode is subsidized by the government.
Two criticisms of the map:

1. A high speed line down the California coast is totally impractical. Mountains, granite and huge grade changes make for an expensive proposition.

2. The broken links in the midwest between the network in Texas/Oklahoma with that stemming from Chicago is silly. Their are mothballed Rights-of-Way there that are perfect alignments for HSR.

Outside that, I'm still very much interested in a way to make HSR work in a number of areas for the US.
How do you ensure someone upholds a code of ethics? Licensing is not the answer. I'm sure there are many PEs that find themselves in similar situations.

I know examples of people in licensed fields who have sworn to uphold a code of ethics, but have been caught up in very similar situations.

I can't find it now but I just saw a video recently of a rail bridge with a crumbling foundation that had just been signed off on by a PE and declared safe by the railroad.
Do two-thirds of Americans travel enough to use high-speed rail?
Not to dismiss your experience as a resident of a country that's received significant aid, but there's substantial evidence that cash transfers work, which GiveDirectly has compiled[0], including the following benefits:

—Adults more likely to work, even five years later.

—Children are healthier and get more education.

—Adults do not spend the extra money on things like alcohol or tobacco.

—Adults make significantly more when surveyed years after receiving the cash grant.

GiveWell, which has spent a lot of effort evaluating GiveDirectly, does have some lingering concerns [1] that programs like GiveDirectly's might worsen inflation or hurt people who don't receive a grant and live nearby. Research on these questions isn't conclusive, but suggests some minor, short-term effects. I suspect broadening programs to more recipients will mitigate the latter problem.

[0]: https://givedirectly.org/research-on-cash-transfers

[1]: http://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/cas...

Update: Fixed formatting and added to final paragraph.
Jonathan Blow: First-Class Types [video]
That one instance when you do need to accelerate quickly without the car car limiting you can be a matter of life or death.

If I get in a car, I expect consistent behavior based on previous performance. If the car pulls a "I'm sorry I can't let you do that Dave" and arbitrarily changes behavior when it feels like it, bad things are going to happen.

In most cases, I'd rather lose control and slip and slide around on/off a road than get flattened by a long vehicle merging into my lane because my car limited my acceleration.
> I think POSIX is overdue for an update.

POSIX is being updated constantly. It is just not as noticeable because POSIX is, as you say,

> an attempt to codify existing practice amongst Unix vendors, picking the best of the most widely supported features, as opposed to actually trying to come up with a good standard.
>Motorcycles are the cheap way onto the road

So are used cars. A smart person doesn't go out and buy a $20,000 economy car. They go buy a $5,000 used car which in fact will be very reliable when maintained. A lot of people instead spend <= $3K.

People don't buy cheap motorcycles in the US for transportation. I've met plenty of motorcycle owners, of all walks of life, and only have met one or two who bought it as their only and primary transportation.

>then getting regulated out of existence

Good luck getting campaign support from Porsche, Ferrari, Lamborghini and other exotic and sports car (ex. there are more Corvette owners than Porsche sports car owners) owners on that one.

There's no backlash against banning Toyota Corollas. However the die-hard car enthusiasts will fight tooth and nail to ensure their expensive sports cars aren't useless, and there's enough of them (with enough money) to ensure any such plan to keep them off the road will fail (and to ensure you never get elected to office again).

The "problem" will mostly solve itself, as eventually (decades), TCO alone will result in most people not owning and operating their own vehicle. Most of what will be left are simply enthusiasts, of which there are a significant enough number (same with motorcycles). They'll pay what it costs to enjoy their toy, while the remaining 99%+ of the population won't care for such things and rely on autonomous cars. Moreover, autonomous cars are going to have decades of development having learned to deal with non-autonomous cars.
Amazon’s beautiful, functional, impractical Kindle Oasis reviewed
I would really like to see that too. My hypothesis is that he would.

Currently I'm experimenting with my grandma, trying to get her to exercise to improve her cognition!
Here in Brazil, ISP and other bills usually come in the form of a Boleto Bancário (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boleto_Banc%C3%A1rio), which you can pay with cash at the bank (or at lottery stores). Utility bills use a similar system. From the point of view of the bill issuer, it's cashless.

I don't know how it works on other countries, but I'd expect similar systems.
Please don't post any comments about how you live in Montana, then.

In the meantime, I thought that it was not merely an interesting article about a particular newspaper in a particular place, but an interesting observation about how to lie with graphs and what interests newspapers really serve.
I was going to write more or less the same thing. The headline is very misleading. Sure, I'd be interested in viable, reasonably cost effective high speed rail that connected cities I travel between. (Which doesn't really describe any of the routes on that map.)

I like trains. I rarely travel between Boston and Manhattan any other way. But there just aren't a lot of routes in the US between high traffic city pairs where travel time at realistic high speed rail speeds with appropriate intermediate stops are going to get you to the 4 hour or so range that you have to hit to be viable. Few business travelers are going to take an 8 hour+ train trip when there's a 2 hour flight option.
How Researchers Revealed Benefits in Marijuana
It's definitely safer. The problem is that it was even better during the period where they skimped on maintenance and so part of what drives the reaction are the million people who remember when you never heard of things like this happening.
Show HN: Ng-prototype
Bomb Sinking Deep Cover – Devo
> If you want proof, just look at the systemd fiasco. Red Hat's way or the highway.

What kind of proof is this? systemd is the new standard across all major distros (except for stuff like Gentoo or Slackware, which is irrelevant in the targeted enterprise market anyway). And in the process, systemd steam-rolled over lots and lots of bizarre inconsistencies between distros.

If that's Red Hat's version of EEE, I'm very happy with it.
Shazam is hiring Data Scientists
We're super excited about this update. Hope the design community are going to love it!
That's because parallelism is an optimization, not a programming abstraction. You might as well ask why function calls and inlined function calls don't have different statements. They certainly can (eg. C's inline keyword) but it is not necessary nor that important to inlining as an optimization.
Similar in most of Europe as far as I know, though many use online banking now. Haven't seen a check in 20 years.
Not to mention that it's incredibly inconvenient if you don't carry a phone, or if you lost it. I tried to signup for airbnb this weekend while traveling, but wasn't even able to go through the verification process without a physical phone. Zero alternatives for verification and even trying google voice (my main 'phone' provider) wasn't good enough. Sure, I could've borrowed someone's phone for a second, but isn't that the sort of thing these systems are supposed to guard against? I don't get it.

Another example - you can't use uber on a desktop without going to m.uber.com last I checked. There's no way to order trasnportation without that m. (why!)

Another - gmail. You either need another email or a phone, and at the time, neither were possible. (why!!)

For tons of reasons, I just don't like having a phone in my pocket 24/7/365. Mostly, I just enjoy the peace of mind of being unreachable. I've been oncall for years, but that oncall vibe is extending more and more into social situations, for the worse. I hate it. Devs - PLEASE account for those like me! I'm really tired of people telling me (accurately :(.) "You wouldn't have these issues if you had a phone." on account of your laziness or lack of awareness for sensible security.
I did the "crontab -r" accidentally today . luckily I had a backup.
What right do you (or government, for that matter) have to tell other people what to use or not,

None. A just law is no more than a collective extension to our individual right to self defense. And we have a moral duty to ignore unjust laws.

http://bastiat.org/en/the_law.html
Because I choose to be bold.

And I like to focus on the main factors in a situation if I can find them.
Traction – a startup guide to getting customer – Book summary |
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11652077
Yeah, I feel like there was a golden age between 1975 and 1985, and then things got stale.

Things started picking up around Linux time, though that age of goodness started getting stale around 2006 (maybe because linux started to get commercialized? Or maybe because everyone started getting interested in handheld devices for their 'fun' programming?)
No you are not.

Only a tiny subset of people who want to fly fighter jets get to do that, even if they select the Air Force as a career. The superset of people who are excluded from flying fighter jets includes a large number of people who are safety-qualified to fly them.

The opportunity to fly fighter jets is approximately as difficult to obtain as admission to an Ivy League school. Zero is the number of reasonable people would say that anyone is "entitled" to admission at a selective college.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11652077
I don't doubt that there is a big problem at agencies like DOD or NSA, but doesn't the plan sound like an excuse to legalize hacking into everyone's computers?
OP implied he was opposed to the ride-sharing legislation and related initiatives. Not Uber and Lyft.
I think the reason has to do with the perception that ridership should be rapidly increasing and it isn't. Population is up, urbanization, is up, but public transit isn't keeping pace. That's an interesting story because it is non-obvious. I don't think there much else to the media fixation than that.
This amounts to exploiting undefined overflow. It's literally the optimization the link describes.
The same can be told of the REPL environments of Smalltalk, Interlisp-D, Lisp Machines, Mesa/Cedar and Oberon.

All more powerful than UNIX shell languages while using structured data.

Coming from Spectrum, MS-DOS and Amiga, the UNIX shell seemed powerful until I discovered how the development workstation should look like, from the eyes of Xerox PARC.
> So you teach grep to take an IDL file, invoke an IDL compiler and dynamically load the parser for the protocol in question. Also, if the broker were a standardized, perhaps in-kernel component (dbus, kdbus), you could attach "idlgrep" to any process to trace its calls.

So you introduce a huge load of accidental complexity because the text interface has some perceived inefficiency? I'll choose simplicity and accessibility over this mess anytime.
A data point - Russia does the same total corruption without international aid. May be it isn't about aid?
the biggest problem with bash on windows is that it has poor interop between Windows tools (to the point of almost no interop). In that sense, cygwin is already better than the recent Microsoft offering.
The title of this article ("Hacking Yourself Out of the Banking System and Live Only on BitCoins") reminds me of Colbert's "I am America and so can you". I expected to find title rage in the thread, but apparently grammarians sleep in.

We gave it symmetrical gerunds.

Edit: on second thought, "hacking yourself out of the banking system" is kind of baity and doesn't seem to add information, so we'll take that out.
Reminds me of Paul Graham's article about newspapers shilling for suit companies: http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Helping you focus on improving your growth rates
I would argue that when people read articles critical of transit, they aren't necessarily thinking of the environmental benefits or the fact that the transportation they use gets a subsidy. And newspaper articles on transit don't put it into context by saying "the interstate next to the railroad costs about as much". Controversial subjects get eyeballs, and that's what the papers want.
My concern with password managers is that if the password database is stolen with my master password, I lose everything. If this script is stolen off my laptop, what do I lose? Attacker would have to guess so much. Even if they did guess all 3 'passwords', they would still have to guess the site, username, etc. Plus, my master password isn't stored anywhere on my machine.

I don't care about forgetting a master password. I can recreate everything.

The flip side is my master password IS distributed across multiple third party datasources that I have no control over....
Show HN: Octarine – Electronic Component / Data Sheet Manager for OS X
Download Latest WinZip Pro v20.5 Build 12118 Serial Keys
This is wrong. Fiat money is already constantly being significantly devalued. Whether you want to measure it by the rise in exchange value of cryptocurrencies (which, despite constant naysayers that simply don't get it, has been meteoric and constant for the past five years) or the increase in monetary base since the global financial crisis which has inefficiently papered over the structural problems and simply kicked the can down the road for an eventual sovereign debt crisis, or the ongoing global currency devaluation wars that all major fiat currencies are presently engaged in to remain internationally competitive.

There is no valid interpretation of the data which yields the result "Fiat currencies are largely the same value that they were ten years ago".

And having invested in cryptocurrencies from the start and quite heavily, I can assure you that I do not "have big problems" in light of this significant fiat devaluation. Quite the opposite, in fact.

But, I get it, this is HN, and falsehoods about cryptocurrencies and worship of the state and its apparatus are par for the course. I should really be used to it by now but it just continues to boggle the mind that year after year this thing smacking everyone here in the face simply continues to be pushed aside and quietly ignored like it's some weird uncle that is soliciting donations for his satanic church congregation rather than the world changing innovation that it actually is.
A big issue is motorists failing to stop for bicycles already on the roundabout. This is particularly problematic with small roundabouts where traffic does not always come directly from the right. A well designed roundabout should make people slow down.

Also, those big signalised roundabout are terrible for pedestrians. It is ridiculous to make someone wait to cross every single feeder road.
The title is a quote from a single source in the article, and is not indicative of the article itself.
Even if the manufacturer is out of business, you can still access your coins. The algorithm for creating the private key is public (BIP39, BIP32, BIP44), as is the actual firmware source code.

The recovery is through a web-based tool, but the order of the words is randomized and displayed only on the device, so even if someone installs a keylogger on your PC, he would need to know the correct order (since it's 24 words, that's safe enough).

(Disclaimer: I work for SatoshiLabs, the manufacturer.)
The fact that mankind shares common decency doesn't invalidate any particular theology. If anything, it sort of undermines physicalist philosophies, since common decency is just an illusion or evolutionary trait (and at some level involuntary) if reality is just random matter plus time.
If it's interesting local commentary then it certainly has a place on HN.
I think we have different definitions then. A thread (green or not) is a context of execution which includes a stack. Saying that it's not what it is seems like you might be thinking of stackless generators or something, which are most certainly not green threads as it's a shallow control switch.

I've spent plenty of time with both green threaded languages and non-green threaded languages. There is a most definitely a difference. A lot of the critiques you've given apply to event loops as well.

For example, data access, sure you can't write half a value but interleaving callbacks for work broken up into multiple stages is just as complex in terms of interleaved flows and would require the same careful treatments you would need in threaded code. The solution there is not to share data, even with events. I'm sure you implicitly do this yourself but there is nothing that makes either better or worse at it.

What you've failed to address are all of the trade-offs event loops have, like forgetful stack traces (and any effective fix keeps a stack of event flow contexts on the side, ironically).

In reality neither green threads or event loops are all that amazing on their own. Great runtimes need a whole lot more, so it seems kind of silly to sit on one side of the fence shouting that there are no downsides on your side of things because there obviously are plenty of problems worth solving better in both camps.
It is called REST and micro-services nowadays.
I would even go one step further. Certainly less than felons. For some reason in Chicago, I at least feel "safer" in a taxi because of the screaming decals and colors of the car.

I had an Uber from the southside to Midway, and I felt like just getting into his car I was being set up in a sting operation. I (white guy) shrunk down in the back seat the entire time. The dude was nice, but holy shit what does CPD think when white guys get in the backs of gangbanger's cars (yes, my driver was nice but sketchy, and his car was exactly the mid-90s low-riding Pontiac you see around here getting busted all the time). I felt like I was his "ride" while he circled the southside between drug pickups. It gave him an "out."

On the flip side, had an awesome middle aged white woman take us from A to B on the northside of Chicago. She was doing it as a part-timer and super nice.

I guess my point is that maybe with taxi companies you at least could/should have a hiring/interview process? I'll plead ignorance to the Uber/Lyft process, but is there even an interview? It's just hit or miss in Chicago.
Education is critical, along with ownership. A lot of the bad practices on either side happen when someone can just fob a mess off onto the other group rather than trying to fix it. Once they have that responsibility it's easier to get someone to care about e.g. how a tarball doesn't address dependency management.
This place is full of local commentary. News doesn't have to be global to qualify.
Lots of previous discussion:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=mcboatface&sort=byDate&prefix&...
Many of those features, particularly the early airbags, markedly improve safety only where the seatbealt isn't used. That was and still is a norm in the US, but in places like Europe or Canada where seatbelt use is near universal, the advantage is minimal. The costs (1000s) are not minimal. So some would say that removing the airbags and spending that money on other things (ie crash prevention) might be the more efficient approach to safety.