skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I love the "We will install updates at 3:30am". I'd really like to see you try. My laptop will be in my bag in the hotel room at 3:30am. Hilton will be really happy with you burning the building down when you remotely switch on my Thinkpad with no ventilation.
I don't know where it came from, but I've always preferred this variant:

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors.
Thanks, that sort of helps. It's still a little confusing though. Branding and naming isn't something Microsoft is awesome at.
The Adobe Kill Switch
.NET Core does work for Windows IOT, on the Pi 2 and 3. So ARM compilation is already there on Windows.
May I say: My intuition is that starting totally from the absolute beginning won't work. Relatively recently (in city building terms) a black community that tried to do that, I remember listening to 99% Invisible about it, and it didn't work out.

http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/soul-city/

It is better to be an adjunct to an existing city near a river or a seaport. Look at China and how they have Special Economic Zones, they are connected to existing cities, right?

I know China builds cities from the start but with their scale they're probably a special case and besides it's thought to be more organic the way they do it (e.g. they don't build some infrastructure like footpaths until they see evidence of how real people use the existing environment).

That's a special case though, nobody else apart from India has that kind of scale.
http://cdn.slowrobot.com/524201613515576555.gif :)
It's a branch of libertarianism that believes that if laws and regulations must exist, they should be implemented at the highest possible level in order to ensure consistency and insulation from provincial arbitrariness.
Origins of a Senior Engineer
EU is as democratic as it gets but I think it failed to market itself as such. There is an elected parliament so what's undemocratic?
I remember working with COM on MacOS 8... And it supported remote objects, so, it'd be, in theory, possible to self inflict that pain.
Supreme Court overturns corruption conviction of former Va. governor McDonnell
So random question: I like when MS people come out and engage the community like we are responsible adults and not like moronic children who need hand-holding and cannot decide for ourselves.

Since we all know the famous "Open Source is cancer" reign of Balmer oft-joked of here, I assume the related issue at hand is culture shift is good and less of a concern now, as opposed to a few years ago. But I am super happy when people like you drop by.

How do people like us on HN, Reddit, and Ars get you and those like you to say, see daveguy's manager[s], we will reconsider our avoidance of the MS tech stack because how daveguy did X?

Is this silly? I am not sure. But I wonder if I am the only one who wants people like yourself to thrive so MS keeps going in this direction.
How many lines would be acceptable? Your frustration is inscrutable.
Perhaps this is just me, but I just don't like cities.

I agree that the things listed in this article need fixing, but I also feel like they're missing the point.

I grew up in a small college town (in a house), but have spent most of my adult life living in cities (in appartments). Somehow, those cities have never felt like home to me. I've always felt like I was missing something. Privacy is not quite the right word. Perhaps solitude.

Growing up, I could easily find space to be alone (and I mean, truly alone) . In my current city, there is literally no way to do that. My appartment is cramped, and low sound isolation means I can hear the neighbors. If I go outside to the park, there is approximately a person per couple thousand square meters (and the noise carries further). If I go to a coffee shop or other public place, it's even more crowded. I can go to the mountains, but it's about an hour by car to get there, and even then there are people around. (Unsurprisingly, the further I have to go, the less likely I am to do it on a regular basis.) This inability to have space has lead to a sort of mild chronic anxiety. Suffice it to say, I don't like cities, but I'm stuck where I am for other reasons.

So I can't exactly say I'm eager for even more population density. Some of the problems above could possibly be mitigated (e.g. better sound isolation), but the broader issues of how much personal space is really necessary just seems like it's not on people's radars. Is this just not an issue for other people? Am I crazy?

I hope that any discussion of better cities includes this as a component.
If it's more efficient for you to make one trip to the store rather than several, it's even more efficient for the store to send one truck to make deliveries to many people in one trip.

Even more so if enough people do so that the store can switch from a storefront laid out for customers (with cashiers, displays, and tags on shelves) to a warehouse.
Exponential growth with retention over time is probably another definition of product market fit. I think the world is always creating new problems to fix and we aren't successfully tackling the hard ones yet (housing, healthcare, poverty, etc).
You mean to tell me clickbait media is biased and manipulative?

I'm shocked.
Maybe you're being sarcastic, but I think it's just a hack with the formatting appearing after the end of file marker that the compiler uses.
One click to root any android phone
That's why you have change control meetings with a change advisory board. Yes they're boring and yes very often the changes don't affect you at all, but it's really nice to hear an admin say "we're taking down critical system X at Y time" and have the ability to say "no you won't, that's when Operation Z is being run".

And that's why a liaison from the "business" side of the organization should be in those meetings too.
Rolls-Royce publishes vision of the future of remote and autonomous shipping
It seems like the obvious thing is to allow both tests in the source file and separate test file.

I like the idea of short functions with doctest-like tests, but written with the real language, syntax-highlighted, etc. In addition to education, it's good for quick prototyping. It's also nice to see at a glance which functions don't have tests!

But I can also see it getting a bit unwieldy for complicated stuff, so in that case you can put it in another file, perhaps with a pointer.

I'm guessing you can't stop people from writing tests in separate files, so I suppose Pyret allows that.

I guess you could write a unit test framework in Python that does this with a tiny amount of metaprogramming.

def Foo():
return 5

def testFoo(t):
t.assertEqual(Foo(), 5)

So you could just look for all the functions in the file named "testFoo" where Foo is also a function, and then run them with the "t" param. Hm.
There’s a New Player in Town, Named Habitat
> We would need to stop the trend of having a small number of large stores and move back towards having a large number of smaller stores. That comes with it's own trade offs in planning an efficient city.

Markets are a great way of finding 'the best' solution to problems like this, but they aren't allowed to function any more in most cities in the US because of the amount of rules and regulations about what can be built where.
Did you intend to paste the same quote twice?
Don't Chrome and Firefox do this by default now? Automatically download an update in the background and install it without asking when you close the browser window?
Since the parent felt the need to use an affiliate link, here's a direct link to The Rent Is Too Damn High - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0078XGJXO/

An amazon affiliate link to a 2.5 star book doesn't really establish confidence in someone's recommended reading list.
Any company with a work-from-home policy.
"Custom" framework.. idiosyncratic code. Code that is probably not properly documented, not properly vetted, or maintained as technology evolves. It is not to say it can't be done (e.g. fb, google, ms), but the cost of doing so greatly outweighs the benefits. For example, security concerns of your "custom" framework and onboarding of new engineering into your team. And are you really in the business fo "custom" framework?
Same here. Also, the people who can afford it and have been in Manhattan their whole lives often have a car or two parked in garages. Brooklyn and Queens are still very car heavy as well.

Also, after a while, those who can afford it (or those who can't but still spend) use Uber / Lyft / Gett / Juno / etc liberally. I haven't been in the subway for at least two months because I can't stand it anymore, and it's especially disgusting in summer.

No car ownership is no way to live your whole life. I feel trapped here. No, I do not want to go through the hassle of renting every time I want to get out of town either. As far as daily commuting, underground systems always suck especially for longer trips. I like above ground commuter trains of hiqh quality, and I like cycling when there's investment in infrastructure and shower / lockup facilities everywhere. Unfortunately not the case.
People have taken your example and run with it, but as someone from Kansas, I implore you not to start a business in Kansas. The governor has run what little infrastructure existed into the ground. There is nothing for you there. I'd suggest somewhere like Austin, where taxes are sufficiently low, the city has a supply of tech workers, and the city has working infrastructure.
> Self-driving cars ... could change this equation by intelligently routing cars around bottlenecks and avoiding the neighborhood entirely

Self-driving cars can do even better than that - they can eliminate the "stopping" nature of the intersection entirely. If the self-driving cars are able to determine the position and speed of other cars approaching the intersection, you can just have the traffic streams pass right through each other. [1]

[1] Autonomous Intersection Management: Traffic Control for the Future https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pbAI40dK0A
Augmented Reality vs Virtual Reality
> I have lived carless and had to make many independent trips per week to buy food.

We mostly walked or biked to the local grocery store in Italy. It led to more fresh food, as you buy stuff in smaller quantities and eat it right away. A large backpack is fine for moving stuff. It worked for our family of 4.
Write a comment under the video, the numberphile people will definitely see it and perhaps pass it on
So Knuth wrote up treatise as a dialog between students. (I havent read it.) Hofstader uses mathe-philosophical dialogs in Goedel Escher and Bach. The Greek philosophers like Plato and Zeno often used such dialogs. Then too Hofstader wrote his book in 1976 as a postdoc at Stanford, two years after Stanford prof Knuth published his Surreal book. Maybe there is an influence.
Now in a position? Ask Londoners and they will tell you that Berlin has already won that battle. The thing is that Berlin is already expected to be on the downturn, actually.
Thanks. That's interesting.

What's better -- the worst city in this list, or a city that doesn't even appear in the list at all?
Social media is a more general concept compared to social networks. Even IRC can be interpreted to be social media.
Make internet a basic utility, paid through taxes, that requires no activation. I've never had to explicitly pay for water or have it turned on/off when I switch apartments, it would be amazing for internet to be the same.

See Pattern Language/Christopher Alexander for ideas on how to design the physical spaces to work for the people who will be using them, including random passersby.

Put cars lowest on the priority list. To me it feels like you should only need a car to travel between neighborhoods, though there would need to be a solution for elderly/less mobile folks.

Build the city near some beautiful nature, and then put a free public transit line that gets people from the city center to there, fast. I live about a 10 minute drive/30 minute bike ride from a beautiful national park, but I rarely go there because it's not fast and easy to get there.

Subsidize a good amount of small office/storefront space for new businesses. Let people try out ideas for shops and businesses without going into crazy debt just to sign a lease.

Make efficiency/sustainability requirements for building WAY higher than the norm. In many climates, AC/heating isn't actually needed if you invest a bit more in building materials upfront and build intelligently.
> Every other method of high-density transportation is also a "human amplifier" and vastly more efficient.

It might be more efficient on average, if you measure in terms of throughput. It isn't more efficient for individual people, who care more about latency. I don't want to turn a 20-minute trip into a 60-minute trip to improve throughput.

I do look forward to fleets of efficient self-driving cars as a better option; that could meaningfully replace driving. Trains and buses alone cannot.
I know class action lawyers who work incredibly hard to defend the 'small people' and don't make that much. They take David vs Goliath cases. They went after a tobacco company, for example.

The lawsuits take a lot of work, they only get paid if they win, and they don't always win.

I'm sure there are class action lawyers who are in it for the money, but most lawyers who are in it for the money would go into corporate law, not class action.
Firetrucks are designed to work on roads, not the other way round.

It's important that a transportation system account for all needs, but fire trucks aren't a need they are one potential solution to the emergency response use case.
Architect here.

New cities normally don't work as expected: cities are like a living organism, they need time to mature. Lots of research was already made on these subjects (most people are not aware of it) and even if some ideas are really good, status quo makes any change very difficult.

By the other hand the knowledge fronteer is still near on building cities in different environments/planets, so IMO, YC should go on that direction instead.
Scott Hunter of MS did an interview not so long ago re .NET, Kestrel (the new libuv HTTP server they build), and their march to build up as a top contender for Tech Empower.

http://dotnetrocks.com/?show=1291

They have a team who does it all for fun and has an impressive testing environment build out. Fascinating to listen to given today's new. I listened a few weeks ago myself.

I have friends at work who liked C# and moved on to frontend. The fact they are so less interested in .NET now is amazing to me as I finally want them to teach me to use ... on Linux!? I never thought I would say that. Haha.
New artificial intelligence beats tactical experts in combat simulation
Light pollution is big for me too. I want to be able to see the stars and the Milky Way at night, why not? It's tangential to noise pollution.
I have never had a Windows laptop boot up for scheduled updates. In that event, it always waitied for the next manual boot.
Lousy healthcare options and lousy schools: https://wallethub.com/edu/states-with-the-best-schools/5335/
And SSH, MySQL.
That's true. But they don't.

Safeway has a long-running delivery program, but they sure aren't pushing it very hard.

The system in Shanghai, where you might expect delivery to be popular, is that supermarkets operate their own buses which stop near your home. It solves the "the store is far away" problem, but it does nothing for the "I need more food than I can personally carry" problem.
Wanna bet that they extend the free offer "by popular demand" or come up with something similar?

Going from "free" to "paid" will guarantee no voluntary upgrades, period. Perhaps if W10 comes bundles with new hardware (just like all Windows versions before it), then - yes, W10 will seep through, but no way in hell anyone will ever explicitly pay Microsoft to upgrade to W10. So they will have absolutely nothing to lose by extending the free offer, so it's exactly what they will do.
Agreed. It's things like the line: "From now on, when people want to snap me with a mobile, I will verify it does not have a Facebook app installed before I say yes."

What is he actually achieving there? People can legally take his picture without his permission. People can take his picture (on a Facebook-less phone) and then upload it to Facebook later. And what sort of malicious things is the Facebook server going to do with his sacred visage anyway?

So a fan asks for a picture, he demands to search through their phone first, probably gives them some anti-Facebook lecture if their apps don't pass muster... but for no actual "privacy" benefit? Okay. It's just bullying.
"What should a city optimize for?"

I think a city needs to optimize for random interactions between diverse groups of people, which often is where that feeling of serendipity or je ne sais quoi feeling in a city comes from. There's no magic to it, you really just need to lay out your infrastructure to help allow for it.

In NYC we have it because of our public transit, mixed use/zoned buildings/neighborhoods, high density, small public parks spread out around the city, walkability, and a diversity of industries. We're losing some of that with the creation of bland spaces in the city [1], but I don't fear that NYC will lose itself anytime soon.

"How should we measure the effectiveness of a city"

It depends on the goal of the city. Are we attempting to make it a cultural capital of the world, like NYC and LA are, or a business capital like NYC and SF/SV are, or both? Or do we just care about providing a great place for people to live and work without much care for the city's perception in the world? Can it be just a nice second tier city like Boston or Seattle?

Personally, I'd aim for an NYC because there really is nothing like it in the states.

The effectiveness measures would also include some vague things, like influence of the exports of its cultural creations (art, music, fashion, tech). International desire to live or visit the city would be another metric. Then of course regular things like employment rates, educational standings, health of citizens, robustness of public transit, retention of citizens, racial/cultural/age diversity, surveyed happiness of citizens, etc.

Start with the art though. If your city doesn't produce a great diversity of culture it'll just stay a second or third tier city.

"How should citizens guide and participate in government?"

If you're building this city from the ground up you have an opportunity to immediately do away with the majority of the bureaucracy that holds most governments back. That'd encourage citizens to actually want to work with or for the government.

I'd avoid having armies of contractors and subcontractors. Create city organizations and workplaces that talented people want to work at, not stifling bureaucracies. Don't pay a consulting firm $600 million to build a payroll system that could be built by a small internal team of talented engineers, designers, and product managers. You probably will still need to pay an outside firm to, say, bore sewers and subway tunnels, but make sure the organization designing and overseeing it is staffed by talented people. That'd mean paying wages that match industry.

[1] https://aeon.co/essays/why-boring-streets-make-pedestrians-s...
Hey Michael, awesome piece! When I started my first company [that made serious revenue relative to other projects], I didn't spend any money until we actually had sales. Getting to product-market fit took awhile for us, as growing the brand and reputation just took time, but now it's an awesome machine that churns well with some spurts of oil here and there.

I think you're spot on with the half-baked, v1, imperfect solution. Currently trying to do the same with a new startup (https://getbeau.com). Our v1 didn't do it for us, but we listened to the recurring feedback and just relaunched our v2 and are continuing to validate that the problem we solve for our customers is a serious (albeit first-world) problem.
Basic cellular automata on a TI-83 plus
Upgrading software isn't (or shouldn't be) planned obsolescence. There's nothing inherent about software that means throwing away hardware. The only reason a Windows 7 machine wouldn't be able to run Windows 10 is if the hardware maker chose to not update their drivers, and at some point you have to stop blaming Microsoft for that.

There is no such thing as planned obsolescence when it comes to software. "Throwing away" software creates no pollution and Windows 10 runs on basically anything Windows 7 ran on.

>There is no valid excuse for Microsoft here.

There is no valid blame for Microsoft here. Windows 10 will run just fine on 10 year old hardware, as long as the device drivers are compatible.
Well, it seems to be working
I experience a physical revulsion just thinking about all the wasted years I spent with COM and DCOM.
I've spent too many hours day dreaming about building a city from scratch in the middle of the country. An ideal spot would be around Wilson Lake in Kansas. It is almost equidistant from Denver, Oklahoma City (with a straight shot to Dallas) and Kansas City right in that sweet spot where high speed rail is more attractive than air travel. Bonus: there isn't an existing city there with existing governance.

I've always thought that if you are building a city from scratch, founding a University would be a great way to start. If you found it with strong programs in any or all of "architecture, ecology, economics, politics, technology, urban planning" then you get a major draw in that people studying these areas would be able to be instrumental in implementing them in a real way. When people are going to University is also one of the major pivot points in people's lives when they are willing to relocate.
FlightAnimator (iOS Core Animation Framework)
Yes, the Eixample district of Barcelona is a good example:

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

Actually it was planned to have a lot more green space (the blocks were only supposed to have housing on two sides so as to leave the other sides unimpeded), but market forces prevailed, and all the green space is now walled off. Shame.

The district is still a lot more liveable than basically any place I've seen in North America, however.
Totally agree. It's hard to do code and stored procedures right with the same level of quality. The tools are different and the thinking is different.
Yeah, the only problem with Samsung is that they most likely going to make builds for the Exynos based SOC which isn't that wide spread.
The ARM ecosystem is quite fragmented and depending on how you build your software it's not as portable as one would assume.

It's also not clear which instruction sets they are going to be aiming for Exynos started with ARMv7 + all the stuff that Samsung added to it, but the newer ships are ARMv8.
The Raspberry Pi still uses ARMv6, 7 and 8 depending on the exact model with the newer RasPi compute, and Zero models still running the old BCM2835 ARMv6 CPU's.

So I'm hoping for a more or less clean stock ARMv7 and ARMv8 builds for the .NET core coming out sooner rather than later, I also hope they'll release the X86 version to more platforms than Windows since running it on something like an Intel Edison which comes with a 32bit ATOM CPU will be quite cool.

.NET is quite powerful and for my taste it's considerably better than Node.JS (I don't like Javascript, this isn't some technical observation just personal preference) but I do like C# and F# quite a bit and having the ability to run the same code across multiple platforms makes me excited for IOT/Embedded devices again especially considering that I don't have to work through some of the headaches that come with Mono (some pun indented).
It's a lovely picture, and it makes a great point. If 200 people want to get to the same place, it's far more efficient to pack them into the same vehicle going to that place.

Now what happens when those 177 cars are going to 100 different places?