skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I thought you lived in a country with high inflation, like Argentina.
At least in many parts of the US. Here in Germany I see plenty of children roaming around in the city every day.
This makes me respect people who learn English as a second language a lot.
Chicago seeking 'smart-city' tech solutions to improve city life
I am objecting to the "Fuck you" part, not his (perceived by me) racial insensitivity, which I think we can continue discussing without appealing to mods.
In the future, the gender disparity gap was addressed
In the future, the gender disparity gap was addressed with a radical idea: to keep boys and girls separate until the age of eighteen. In this society, The Equal Futures Academy for Girls and the Equal Futures Academy for Boys were formed to re-educate the two genders without the inherent biases of society. The Equal Futures Academy propels more girls into the arena of captains of technology than any other school in the world. Frankie, Libby and Sheridan of the Girls Who Code are a premiere coterie of students with brains, beauty and binary bravado. The expert hackers have found a way to interact with the boys from their sister school and trouble ensues. Code Academy is a peek into the inner world of adolescence, gender identity formation and the role of cyber space in this tumultuous time of growth.
Actually, American suburbia is responsible for the widest diffusion of land ownership in history (even if it is only a 1/4 acre or so). So it has got that going for it.
There was a previous article[0]/discussion[1] on HN that contained a similar map of proposed high speed rail lines. This previous map made less sense because it encouraged building out new HSR lines across the vast expanses on the American midwest.

I like this new map better though - HSR makes the most sense for medium-distant transit. The Mid-Atlantic/New England area is a perfect example of a region where a lot of mid-distance travel happens. The current rail lines are okay but not fantastic and improved lines would be a positive for travelers.

[0]: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/opinion/sunday/a-new-map-f...
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11506446
Ages ago I was in the top five for Domination in CoD:WaW. It was still remarkably challenging and exciting. Its not about which team wins (as long as I had one or two of my "good friends" any lobby was going to be a team win), as you get better the number of "micro contests" on each map grows: can I get dogs before we get the B-flag, can I satchel charge the enemy tank as I hop in the weakened tank my loser teammate bailed from, etc. Not to mention there is always the increased expectation to never have a bad game if you are on the top of the leaderboards and a bad game is not just a dent in your W/L, it also produces the inevitable deluge of moronic messages from people accusing you of boosting and being a try hard.

I think competitive video gaming is like anything else, in order to excel and stay at the top you have to constantly compete against yourself.
>and then act surprised that nobody takes Amtrak

But lots of people take Amtrak in the Northeast Corridor--enough to subsidize the rest of the system. The problem is that there aren't any other areas in the country that are as well-suited for busy inter-city rail as the Boston to DC corridor. Almost everything else is lower density and further apart.

I'm not an expert on transportation cost structures but my observation in most places in the world is that, given a decent highway system, buses are going to beat intercity trains every time when it comes to price.
Using LD_PRELOAD to cheat, inject features and investigate programs
The examples seemed rather clear to me of what it is in general, but I didn't look at the details.
> Seems a lot of the arguments is based around the fact that suburban developments are poorly designed, not that the idea of suburban life is flawed.

Well, yeah. A well-designed area isn't "suburbia", it's "a small town that happens to be adjacent to a larger city".
>>I suspect many (perhaps most) of the people reading that article agree that suburbia sucks - the tricky part is fixing it.

"Fixing" it by doing what? Making it more like the urban core? That place already exists. If you like it then go live there. Obviously many people like the lifestyle of living in the suburbs. There is room in this country for more than one kind of neighborhood.
I'd prefer a more modest speed rail that went from where I am to somewhere I want to go. It does no good at all to travel at high speeds somewhere else, when all that saved time is more than lost trying to get from else to where I want to go.

I'd even prefer slower rail to my car, because I can read on the train, and I don't have to spend 5-10 min parking.
Haptic Retargeting: Dynamic Repurposing of Passive Haptics in VR [video]
Nothing justifies Menzio's behavior, either on the plane or later on Facebook where he made outlandish claims and invoked Trump. He is completely obnoxious, and the author of his own misfortunes.
The personal autonomous car is just the first, simplest version of the autonomous vehicles.

It won't be long before much smaller, short-distance, rentable systems come out -- self-balancing cycles that convert to cycle-trains, and so forth.

As autonomous vehicles makes roads much safer, two-wheel systems that are currently too dangerous will become much safer, and much more desirable.

As people are less inclined to own their own vehicle, and as delivery systems are more common, there will be less incentive to own a large car. People will rent two-wheel autonomous bikes instead of four-wheel autonomous cars, if its going to cost half as much.

The profit motive alone will solve these issues.
> in practice this is rarely occurring

Mainly because wallet spoofing is not yet lucrative enough for hackers to put a lot of effort into it. If BTC really does start to get major traction, then it is only a matter of time before the web will be flooded with bitcoin wallet spam and phishing attacks.
Suburbia exists because people want a quiet, relatively safe place for their kids to grow up. I didn't realize this until I had children myself. I remember reaching my teenage years and cursing the dull, boring, culturally bankrupt suburbian neighborhood I grew up in. I left the minute it became feasible.

Fast forward to now, and I'm right back in the 'burbs, in a house where my kids have access to safe streets, parks, and decent schools. I realize now that it was never my parents' responsibility to raise me in a place I would find interesting, but to give me the best possible start in life they could. If I can give my kids a similar start, I hope they can safely reach the age where they can go off and experience the adventure of the big cities and abroad when they're ready, just like I did.
For most Americans, getting around means driving, and other modes are seen as either impractical (walking), a toy (biking), or just for the poor (transit). It's a relatively difficult culture in which to improve alternative modes of transport.

Self-driving cars will go a long way towards improving this. The focus needs to be on avoiding silly mistakes in the meantime, like sinking billions of dollars into new fixed-rail transit routes that will be obsolete the day they enter service.
It's lichess.org.

lichess.com is a parked domain with what appear to be some very malicious ads.
> The fix is hard, requiring decades to reach the necessary policy changes, and decades more for those to play out in built infrastructure.

I agree that finding the issued in place would be time consuming, expensive and difficult. However, it is possible we are seeing a different way of fixing the issue: migration back to the urban core with the downtown revitalization of many cities.

Or building new areas that have different characteristics: Stapleton here in Colorado is a mixed use neighborhood built in the last decade or so. Not perfect, but a different set of mistakes.
Yuri, after seeing these comments, we're going to have to agree to disagree. I'm not sorry for being angry, but I'm sorry for getting personal. I'm sure you're needing some help with something local to your community, unless you want to start a thread of how to help kids on the south side of Chicago get into this community.
I was in an Uber last night in San Francisco. The driver had just started driving for the ride sharing company. During my 20 minutes in the car, the driver was flirting with the other passenger in the pool, and she was visibly uncomfortable. After dropping her off, he told me how he spent 13 years in prison, how he just got out, and how he "knew the Menendez brothers while in the pen". All of this was completely unsolicited btw.

Now I'm a big fan of uber and lyft, and generally feel safe taking it but an experience like that will make you reconsider.
I got the impression that the internal encoding Python chooses for a string is an implementation detail you shouldn't (and cannot) care about. All the public ways if accessing string contents operate on code points, unless you convert the string to a byte array first.
I am not required to provide you with a first-principles reasoning for why racism is bad. I get the impression that you'd like that requirement to be the norm here, but it is not.

There's not much of a reason to let this subthread get any deeper, is there?
I'm trying to find words to describe my distain for this article, but I can't think of anything that isn't seen as a direct attack on the author, which isn't my goal.

Basically America is bad because we had space for cars when they were invented?

There are plenty of places in America where you can get by without a car. I live in "suburbia". A small city of 30,000 in Indiana called Valparaiso. We have a vibrant downtown and where you can live, shop, eat, go to shows, etc. We have public transportation with a local bus line and also bus service into Chicago.

I think the author is just finding excuses for being unhappy.
> What makes non-whites deserving of protection from bad laws but non-medallion owners undeserving?

In the United States, this question is answered by Federal Laws which define Protected Classes [0].

Non-medallion owners are not a protected class (yet) according to US Federal Law.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class

EDIT: provide link
Its really a toss up between lichess and fics. I wish lichess did not let people chose color for rated games. I also miss xboard...
Is it possible that these people and orgs want to keep some of their money as savings — and who cares where they are, since they're just supposed to sit in a vault anyway? Of course, the more enterprising governments cannot have that, and your savings are never truly savings (or yours, for that matter). Having savings in a foreign economy, in a different jurisdiction is the equivalent of an offsite offline backup — it's just good practice.

The commies at Guarniad of course don't rely on savings for their retirement, so they don't see it that way.
To be honest, the questions seem a bit trollish, but I will try to answer anyway.

a) Homo sapiens is a social animal (you can check this on Wikipedia if you are unfamiliar with the term). Therefore it tends to confer special status to members of its own species. I am not saying this is right or wrong - you asked "why" and this is the answer.

b) In part this has the same answer as (a): we (humans) tend to privilege other humans (or species we find socially valuable, like dogs and cats) and have much less problems in using other animals as a fungible resource.
But even an ethical vegetarian or an animal rights activist would not say that cars, toasters or macbooks should not be traded, used, and finally scrapped.

Why? Well, these things do not have consciousness and cannot experience pain. There is nobody experiencing "abuse", not even enough "somebody" to experience pain or discomfort. If you are ok with the idea of selling stones or kicking sand around, you should be ok with scrapping laptops, too.

When (if) machines reach the point where they actually experience things, then we will have to deal with that. Hopefully ethically.
I doubt it will happen soon, though.
Unless you are already a good chess player, 10 years isn't long enough to become world class, even for a talented youngster. Thousands of hours of practice is necessary, but not sufficient, to become truly world class. You could become a strong amateur, but without special talent you wouldn't be able become a grandmaster.
I'd argue that it'll soon be the other way around. Many of the improvements in Pascal were driven by scientific computing. It's easy to justify adding new features (like high speed 16 bit FP) when Facebook or Google is willing to buy datacenters full of the things.
Wow, they sure don't. In fact, nationwide gas tax and tolls cover about 32% of highway costs. [http://taxfoundation.org/article/gasoline-taxes-and-tolls-pa...]

(But that just says to me our gas taxes should be higher. :)
That's not a very good assumption; the universe has a finite size and therefore cannot contain an infinite amount of information.
How to create a compelling hero message for your homepage (+ 30 great examples)
If self driving taxis were run by a government entity I'd buy your argument.

But if run by private enterprise they will either figure out how to deal with the problem or go out of business.

Capitalism isn't in vogue now but it is a tremendous self regulating mechanism that government will always lack. If you question that imagine how long a fast food restaurant could survive with bathrooms like the one in your picture?
I feel like I've seen source code that reads like this.
Can't you just use the same logic to make the opposite point?

"In particular, people who commute using public transit are happy to read anything which externalizes and validates their views about the viability of single-occupancy vehicles."

In general, it's not constructive to make arguments based on questioning the motivations of people you disagree with. I try to always assume rationality and good faith on the part of everyone, even when they appear to be brainwashed or just plain crazy from a distance. Trying to figure out why people might be irrationally disagreeing with you is a lot less useful than trying to figure out why people are rationally disagreeing with you, even when they are being irrational (because aren't we all, in one way or another?).
I live in suburbia right now. I love to walk places—I walk to work, to the store, etc. But my town seems to be built for cars, cars, cars. The exchange with the interstate is huge, and takes forever to cross, by foot, because the signal timing is designed for cars. Then I cross parking lots to get where I want.

I like the idea of having stores with parking in back, having more equal streets rather than privileged highway interchanges, etc. But in the meantime, having the forest closer to me is not worth the cost of spending more time in the concrete sprawl.
"Budget" is the operative word there: Controlling the expenditure of tax dollars is one of the fundamental things elected officials do in a democracy. Thus current governments can't ever truly bind future ones.

Unless the money is in an account with your name on it, what you have is a political promise, not a contractual obligation or an asset.
A bot telling me 'That she is sorry to hear that I'm not feeling well and I might need to take some time off to recover' feels pretty weird to me. I would prefer a more factual dialog.
I like to think what Michael Stevens(VSauce) said in his video[1] as a continuation of Asimov's letter.

"Susan Haack compares knowledge to a crossword puzzle. Old answers interweave with old one. They all reinforce one another. The clues are the question we ask. And the way the answers fall into a predetermined grid...well, that's our confidence that we are on the right track."

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNqNnUJVcVs
Write a program with another peogrammer. Do it as many times as possible with as many people. Software is built in the mind. Understand other minds and you will understand software better.
Personally, I prefer taking the train in the Northeast Corridor but:

1. There is a regular train from EWR right into Penn Station

2. Even though the train is more convenient in a number of ways, flying can get me from Boston into Manhattan earlier in the day than the train. Usually doesn't matter, but it may if you have a morning meeting and can't come down the previous night.

3. Although I've taken it, the Acela all the way from Boston to DC starts to not make sense vs. flying--and tends to cost more as well.
Consider the New England states, where there are a lot of organically-developed small towns that are low-density and low-population but still reliably avoid most of the problems in the article.
Unless this is the speaker of a very similar TED Talk, this guy borrowed tons of soundbites in the process of writing this article.

Edit: just finished reading it. He has plagarized 10+ 'jokes', and most of his content was heavily 'inspired', from this excellent TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_sub... . Very very uncool.
Bullshit! I will believe it when 2/3 or Americans put $1,000 or so deposit towards a high speed rail system.
I like eikenberry's explanation of why in the sense of "what was the logic"; I speculated some on practical tradeoffs over on lobste.rs:

https://lobste.rs/s/c8pxgu/performance_green_threads_why_it_...
Manodharma
I certainly prefer to live in an urban environment as an adult, but growing up my anecdotal experience was very different than that described in the article. As a kid in the burbs in the 90s, we'd roam all over the place. Hop on the bikes and ride downtown, tool around greenway close to the hood, take the bus to the mall, etc.
Not really. A city is an administrative area, yes, but depending on where you are in the country the role you are describing might be a "township." In addition, there are often qualifiers to be a "city" in most states. Most cities end before reaching rural areas and you get into a township or "just a" county; we generally refer to "rural" as not in a city in casual conversation. Urban is different and not necessarily the direct antonym of rural; there's a middle ground.

California seems to be an exception where my GPS will report a city quite far away as "where I am now" when I'm in the sticks, but that might be my GPS. California is also less particular about administrative division naming than, say, Michigan.

City, town, village, county, parish, and township all have particular meanings that vary across the country. This is not an area where one can say "the USA" and be correct, as with many things in our really-50-countries patchwork. One example is that Wisconsin dubs "towns" what Michigan calls "civil townships."

America is confusing, even before you get into the debate over New Urbanism.
According to Wikipedia, Valparaiso Indiana was a regional transportation hub in the mid 19th century. I suspect it has considerably different city plan than more recent “suburbs”.

Try comparing an online map satellite view of Valparaiso to some new housing development from >1990, and you’ll observe dramatic differences.
What's an accurate, neutral title? We're happy to change baity titles when users suggest better ones. Sometimes we just couldn't think of one ourselves.
No, I meant what I said. Most basic research is useless in essentially all respects (not just in terms of the economic effects of its output). That does not necessarily mean that it's bad research, intellectually speaking, just that society is no better off for it.
I can see this. It tends to be the "safe" middle group between urban and rural while having none of the benefits of either.
Apology accepted, as well as the agreement to disagree as well. FWIW, I've lived in some very choice parts of Oakland and Brooklyn throughout my life, so I am familiar with the environment, and the need for safety. The hard work in normalizing relations is exactly that: giving people that set off your spidey sense an opportunity for honest work.
So the term is a sort of derogatory used only for badly designed sprawling suburbs without proper access to e.g nature?
Sounds like you rediscovered "The Hacker's Diet"

Summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker%27s_Diet

Book: http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet
But inflation of a currency is a good thing. Hyperinflation and deflation are the things you want to avoid.
Bay Area leaders consider merging region (2013)
In the burbs near where I grew up, there was nothing to do but drive drunk, if the accidents were anything to go by
That's what your boss is for.
> Downvote all you want.

Please don't break the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11654767 and marked it off-topic.
UniK – a tool for compiling applications into unikernels
So how's that war on suburban sprawl going in San Francisco? Oh right...
Grail: Pan-cancer blood screening test for circulating tumor DNA
So does the database essentially feed the tables referenced in the query through the gpu?

Does it accumulate values as it goes? Work on all the values together in memory?

Anyway, it seems like this sort of speed should also allow one to work with larger indices and do the sort of queries that allows.
50 Cent's Oldest Son
For reading and editing plain text you only need a text editor, for reading and editing JSON you'll need a JSON parser (yes, you can do it manually, but non-tech people won't) and a JSON renderer, which means an app with a new interface built for this. Since the JSON format has a schema, the app must know about this schema (so it can display a text area instead of a normal text input in the JSON field corresponding to the body of the note), which means it must be your app and yours only, which means the JSON files saved with your app are unusable elsewhere.

Please consider supporting plain text.
I've split my life living downtown (SF, NYC, London, Melbourne, TO) and in the suburbs.

Outside my house the only thing I hear is the wind tossing about with the trees. Can't hear my neighbors or traffic or people on the street. Contrast that to when I lived in areas where the bars or homeless/mentally unstable individuals would keep me up all night.

And I love all the space. Yes, it's a double edge sword. But I have lot more space for my hobbies such as bike ownership/maintenance, musical instruments, photography studio... I can sit in my backyard and just meditate or play music. When I lived downtown, I had to rent space or just forego certain things.

Lastly, I like how there's less population density. Downtown, good luck if you want a seat at the nearby cafe. Whereas my local cafe which has ample parking also has ample open seats.

I'm not trying to say surburbia > urban living. They just have very real differences that suit different people and life stages.
Exactly. Most people aren't in a position to waive their salary for a few years on the off-chance a moonshot works out.
Yes, children being restricted in where they can go is a completely unrelated phenomenon, due to trumped-up fears of crime. When I was a kid, my family let me bike for miles. You can go a long way in a suburb on a bike without encountering faster motor traffic than you might trust a kid to deal with.
This breaks the site guidelines by calling names ('fanboys') and complaining about downvoting.

The problem with comments like this is that they degrade the discourse even if they're true.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html