skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Toronto has enough space that LRT makes way more sense financially than subways but Ford ruined LRT in the minds of almost everyone.

Even GO could cut down a lot of traffic if they'd just add more parking lots on the edge of the city and make it all day two way. When I use to live north of the city there were 3 trains into Toronto in the morning on the Stouffville line and 3 trains back at the end of the day and if your schedule didn't fit them exactly then you had to drive to Finch and hope for a parking spot or drive in.
care to list some of those sauces?
You could try Joel Spolsky's Painless Functional Specifications series.

The first article is https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/10/02/painless-functiona....

Edited for formatting.
When I heard about this previously I wondered if it's a way of developing tunnel boring technology and expertise that would ultimately be useful on Mars. Underground tunnels and spaces are likely to be useful for a Mars colony and Musk is trying to figure out a way to get someone to fund it here first.
It's funny, I thought I would hate those too, but after a recent visit to Ukraine, the "suburbs" that consist of those apartment highrises with lots of greenspace in between have their charms. You get the open spaces, you get the tons of small commerce, you get the public transit to city center and elsewhere, and you get local and larger community. I thought I would hate it, but it's pretty damn awesome.

>“But everybody wants to live in one.”

This was the part that I didn't understand until I experienced it. If they were more visually appealing from the outside, and in the stairways, people may stop hating them.
You don't know anything about my home defense setup to be wagging your finger at me. My guns are stored in a Graffunder safe when I'm not home. If you know anything about safes, you'll know those guns are not going anywhere, even if the burglars have all weekend with a blowtorch.

As someone else already pointed out, # of criminals shot vs. successful burglaries is a ridiculous statistic. But it's coming from the Violence Policy Center so that's not surprising.

What's your proposed alternative? If burglars are already armed and violent (your own words) I should disarm myself and submit myself to their mercy? No thanks.
The video shows some sort of shuttle using the track. Those could be small busses or even public transport.

http://imgur.com/a/Wv8YD

In effect, this is a subway system. It's an underground rail system. The major difference is that you have a mixture of public and private passenger vehicles and smaller vehicles.
In parts of Europe Jodel[1] is pretty popular.

[1] https://www.jodel-app.com
If he wants to get into the tunnelling business and start bidding on these "big dig" projects in various cities, I think he'll find some success. His engineering aptitude, his ability to think around problems, that's gotten him to where he is today.

If he retreats from this and builds some kind of pneumatic tube system to transport goods, people, or whatever, he still might have a chance of a win. Those systems have been proposed, and in some cases actually built, and in many cases they've been great ideas.

If he stubbornly insists on pursuing this batshit insane system of tubes he will fail, and he'll fail hard. There is not enough concrete in the world to make that many tunnels.
edit: tunnelling is a broadly solved problem. It's difficult, expensive, slow, etc

Well, which is it? Solved, or difficult/expensive/slow?
How does the FAA get involved in regulating flights that originate and end outside the U.S.? The author states "I have been asked to sit on 14-hour flights from the UW to the Middle East, only to then fly the same aircraft to Asia on another nine-hour journey"

That means ferrying the pilots as passengers to location; at which point they become pilots for the next leg. It's still shit. It's bad ergonomically, it's very dehydrating, and you're getting a higher dose of cosmic rays.
https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/aircrew/cosmicionizingradia...
Sure they did.
I think at this point it's useful to disentangle the city of San Francisco and the much less dense surrounding Bay Area. If you want to live in a high-density city, in this area that would be San Francisco. Its employers and residents (and prospective residents) should certainly push for 24 hour transit, more complete transit coverage, and whatever else is necessary for living in such an environment.

However, the rest of the Bay Area isn't really city-like. Much of the existing infrastructure has been built around cars as the mode of transportation. Building a second high-density city out of nothing somewhere in this area and convincing employers and employees to move there doesn't seem like it would be well received. If the employers and employees in this area wanted to be located in a high-density city they'd already be in San Francisco. Many are - but many are not.
Per distance costs should be theoretically comparable? (Regulation costs and labor coming to mind as drivers of cost differences)
How to Solve the Biggest Problems with Side Jobs for 2017
Some applications will indeed do that to guard against the server-side memory cost of thousands of postgres pool connections. It makes sense when queries are relatively rare.

This was the solution that we used at MX Logic in the early years, before we moved to pgbouncer and went back to long-lived stateless connection pools.
People also tend to object to "move fast and break things" when they, and their very expensive buildings, are on top of said things and get broken as a result.
I feel like you're underestimating how big a deal creating a complete burger from scratch is. This isn't a partial squeeze out a patty, eject some condiments and then have a human assemble type of project. This is custom freshly ground meats, freshly chopped toppings and full assembly. This is difficult stuff for machines and it's nearly complete.
At a job interview you're typically not allowed to use the web and also typically expected to answer a question within seconds instead of within days, so the environment is very different from working with unexpected things on the job. You could design an interview process where neither of these were true, but I think it's pretty hard and comes with its own downsides.
On the other hand, investments in better boring technology produces a lot of valuable real world construction industry IP for pretty conventionally dull projects that happen to involve underground travel (as well as potentially being useful for his Mars and megacity dreams). Millions of people travel on underground railways and drive through hillsides every day. Whereas most innovations necessary to develop relatively-less-unsafe means of propel people at high speed through long distance above-ground vacuum tubes are kind of predicated on the assumption that people might actually travel in a way similar to his concept sketch.

Ignoring the marketing video, it's easy to see why he's potentially going to spend more engineer time and money on the boring technology and schemes for building big swooping curvy tunnels through prime metropolitan real estate whilst being happy to "open-source" the idea of firing people through metal vacuum tubes for others to work on.
In a vacuum, with no costs associated maybe. But we're talking about vast amounts of money being taken from people and redistributed, huge egos vying for political power, and a host of other reasons that make it more complicated than if 2% are wrong or not. Even those 2% may not be doubting "man made global warming" but other aspects about it that make them want to act like...scientists, and question theories and findings and not jump into the global warming pool head-first like so many.

Incidentally, and this is food for thought not an opinion of any sort, I'm almost 50 years old, and I've now been a part of 3 global climate scares. One cooling; one warming; now both after previously warming, but none of the predictions have come to pass, except the world has become infinitely friendlier to it than we were when I was a kid, which were the days of the crying indian commercial, 10 MPG behemoth cars, and a shiny new EPA.
Mystery of Antarctica's Blood Falls Is Finally Solved
Colleges banned it because their little snowflakes got offended.
Agreed, when's the last time you saw a debugger for a stored procedure? There aren't any. If you want to debug such a thing, you've got to write a bunch of print statements like it was 1982
>Also, what is the point of those rails? Seems like self-driving cars would be much easier and require a lot less.

That was my first reaction as well. I think it might have to do with there being no way of expelling the exhaust gas. As long as even just 1% of the cars using the tunnel are fossil fuel powered their exhaust will poison the whole system (carbon monoxide can fuck you up at even just 50 PPM).

They could limit the tunnels to just self-driving electric cars though.
Nonsense. I use the virtual floppy drive in VMs all the time, because I'm virtualizing legacy systems. But I do agree it could probably be disabled (and thus unexploitable) by default.
> Or he just hates LA traffic.

Nope that's the main one. You obviously haven't lived in LA :)
Can you explain how you kept the algorithms/data structures knowledge in your head fresh enough to pass Google interview on the spot? Were you a fresh grad?
If your theory of ethics is "when people trust me I can do anything I want to them", then we are at best on opposite sides of an ethical chasm. But I'm not sure that "I will take advantage of anybody I can" qualifies as ethics at all.
The problem with such tunnels is that they're natural monopolies, not least because underground space in reasonable depth is finite. It's not a service you'll get competition on.
"This failure is not on regular people"

Regular people are the ones who voted for those in power who declared that Global Warming was a hoax. Regular people are the ones who voted for leaders who prized returning to coal instead of advancing renewable energies.
Many US passenger rail systems were private but stopped turning a profit and were "nationalized".
You confuse inalienable rights with contractual rights. The passenger had a contractual right to be on the plane.
I think a fairly large number of people either don't believe it or don't belive it's man-caused (to whatever extent) and therfore don't believe there's anything practical to be done about it.
I found the use of shrug emojis in response to substantive points from the Uber paper pretty infuriating.

I didn't say that postgres is difficult to use. I said that the slides give that impression.
People said moving phonebooks to the internet was stupid. Then he founded Zip2. People said moving banking to the internet was stupid/insane. Then he founded x.com which merged with and became what we now know as Paypal. People said he couldn't possibly make rockets from scratch that go to space. Then he did it. People also said he wouldn't land rockets on boats. Then he did it. Then they said he would never refly a "launch proven" rocket. Then he did.

As absolutely insane as his goals are, betting against him overall tends to be a losing bet. I'd be careful about what you think SpaceX "isn't" going to do. If it is technologically possible, they will do it. Period.
There's been a ton of government action to build the early industry, though, in the form of subsidies. It's something that we've seen in aerospace, the history of the semiconductor industry, and even in a ton of biotech. Government subsidies fund the early risky research, and often the military provides the early price-insensitive customers of new expensive technologies. With renewables, tax credits have been very influential in widening the market of early entrants.
I wouldn't be surprised if a 2x or 3x more efficient boring machine is the ultimate product of this and it makes future infrastructure projects much cheaper as a result.
You can have multiple operators compete on the same rail line, though.
> It seems crazy, but there's also some appeal in the idea of opting out of all the legacy infrastructure. If we could rebuild our roads from scratch today to serve a vehicle for the 21st century, what would we build?

I don't know, but we did rebuild our roads from scratch to serve as a vehicle for the 20th century, and it was a disaster. Let's first fix the problems that the last attempt to start from zero created (read up on Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs), before trying to start from zero again.
It's just pedantic.
>> "(personal opinion: there are none coming)"

Former tunnel boring engineer here.

There is a ton of room for innovation around tunnel boring machines built by the major manufacturers (primarily Herrenknecht and Robbins), around reliability, durability, ease of serviceability etc. I cannot emphasize enough how modern TBM's require an unbelievable amount of engineering attention, repair labor, spare parts infrastructure etc, similar to many super-early-stage fragile prototype technologies. Unfortunately TBM's are no longer early stage, but for some reason the technology is frozen at just-good-enough-to-barely-work."

However I don't know if the economics will work out to fix any of these. Here are a couple of the big problems:

* Most TBM's are semi- or fully-customized for a single job. This raises machine costs. It'd be better if there were only a small range of small-medium-large TBM's that work ~everywhere.

* Most TBM's are fully assembled in the factory, smoketested aka turned on to make sure they work, disassembled and shipped to the job, then reassembled and used. This is not efficient, surely we can figure out a better way.

* Most TBM's are entombed aka thrown away at the end of the job, because getting them out of the hole is expensive and difficult.

* Changing the cutterheads is labor intensive and dangerous and requires highly trained very expensive humans, and it's slow. While you change the cutterheads, your billion dollar toy is sitting there doing nothing.

* TBM architecture is highly dependent on geology. A slurry faced TBM that works in mixed soils is a totally different beast from a hard-rock TBM. It would be cool to have one machine that works in many geologies, perhaps with minimal or automated modifications.

* TBM's require lots of care and feeding from a small army of humans. This raises job costs.

* Topside support infrastructure such as slurry plants and ground freezing machinery comes from different vendors, often even from different countries. E.g. it's common to buy your topside slurry plant from the MS company, in France, while your ground freeze vendor might be Tachibana from Japan. Often each subsystem's engineers on site literally don't even speak a common language. Hilarity predictably ensues. Vertical integration would pay huge dividends here.

Ideally Elon can mass-produce TBM's that just work out of the box for most jobs, and that are easier to work on. Then we can laugh him out of town for his stupid "put cars in tunnels" ideas and use his miracle machines to build sensible train tunnels.
> The additional cost for "clean" energy is surprisingly low

Only if it can supply reliable base load power. Which it can't, unless you include nuclear power in "clean energy". Which most clean energy advocates don't appear to be doing.
They exist. The problem is getting approval to build them anywhere near residential areas is problematic.

https://www.slashgear.com/japans-new-maglev-bullet-train-is-...

That's 600km/h. For 600mph you'd need Hyperloop to prove they can do that speed first.
How do tunnels solve bad driving? Tunnel accidents are even worse than those on the surface.
If he wasn't caught, I doubt we would have heard about it.
How to Win at Life
What have you reduced?
Tell yourself what you need to.

https://www.google.com/search?q=monsanto+conagra+pharmaceuti...
Neat video of Clark photographing them for Nat. Geographic. He slowly and interactively builds the lighting scheme as he goes along. https://youtu.be/vCxJ8-Rpv4o?t=350
Can I ask you to share info on what you're using to study for the design stuff?
Real books are back. E-book sales plunge nearly 20%
Right, going forward, the need of government action is going to be considerably less necessary. But new technologies have a certain cost disadvantage, and government support helps to cross that gap quicker. Especially, when new power plants have to compete with 30 year old coal plants, which are cheap to operate but very dirty.

But the crossover point seems to be very near - here in Germany a big offshore wind project failed to qualify for government support, but the driving company decided to go ahead nevertheless, as they plant to be cost efficient enough without any support. So this is very good news.
Auto piloted cars could easily reap the "conveyor belt" advantage if they were the only type of vehicle allowed on the road.
Ridiculously wasteful. Not needed. Optimize "self-driving in packs with prefiled flight plans." No new infrastructure required.
> But there's no engineering reason why a hole in the ground can't happen.

Depending on the specific location, there may very well be. Underground tunnels are vulnerable to earthquake-inflicted damage, for instance, and you would want to avoid repair as much as possible.

Similarly, there may be environmental or conservatory reasons not to build tunnels, or reasons related to cost, or obstacles not yet encountered (that last one is less likely though).
What wasted effort? Sure, not all of my initiatives gain traction, but to expect otherwise would be unrealistic. Perhaps I've just been lucky to work at companies that are receptive to personal initiative, improvements and ideas.

Regardless, I would much prefer to have a working environment where I'm engaged and involved and making an impact than where I'm only grudgingly doing just enough to get by, even if it doesn't lead to recognition and rewards. Although, in my experience, it does.
https://github.com/CrunchyData/postgres-operator is the most promising thing I've seen lately.
But can you get a moving block signalling system such that they can follow each other with minimal separation? Until you can do that, a real train will always win at people/hour due to the fact that you can have more people per consist as ultimately the signalling challenges are comparable and you can therefore have comparable separation.
Perhaps if you're building a cellar. If you want to make a 10-story building - even in a virgin terrain, it's a complicated operation.

Not to mention that you need to make the materials such that they resist a huge side pressure, water leaks and so on.

Psychological costs are also costs.
I've always enjoyed this theory. Just one guy figuring out how to take over a planet; no big deal.
>Musk would do significantly better to drop a full subway network.

In the same way a road offers private and public transportation, a tunnel can do both. Why can't the car be a bus, say?
This concept still exists, even applies to tech workers.
http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/11/08/judge-dismisses-ap...
As someone who participated in this transition, I don't think that was a part of it. The new database layer took quite a bit of instruction to use properly as well, and there were plenty of people misusing it.
A bus can't modify the skyline of New York City as easily.
hilariously.
Secular Talk BLACKLISTED by YouTube
I like mu4e because it integrates with orgmode well. However, it is not the best client for managing Exchange meeting invites and plain text responses are not very readable in outlook. Were you able to solely rely on mu4e without using Outlook?
Not at all. Codes of ethics are very helpful in preventing unethical behavior because they summarize a large amount of careful thought about ethics. That's one of the reasons so much of religious thought and literature, theistic and non-, is about the finer details of good behavior.

Being a decent person is a good start, but that's just not enough. It's a complicated world, and the obvious thing isn't always the right thing. Especially when people are embedded in an economic system that strongly rewards behavior that could easily be ethically dubious.
There's a section in this book that discusses the inability of a narcissist to fix a motorcycle. As a software engineer with narcissistic tendencies, that section really struck a nerve, and inspired me to dive way deeper into our systems and try to understand "what where they thinking" when working in a legacy code base someone else designed. This curiosity has led to several aha moments that I would have prematurely dismissed as an idiotic code base designed by idiots had I not spent the time to try and understand it.
> that "trillions of dollars" is a baseless assumption that's just pulled out of somebody's behind

No, it isn't. It's what is quoted by the people advocating mitigation.

> most mitigation analyses have us saving money

Because they claim that the savings from adopting all these clean energy technologies will more than outweigh the costs of switching to them. Which is based on...assumptions pulled out of somebody's behind. Or, if you prefer, economic models that have no track record of predictive success.

In other words, mitigation means we pay the costs, and then we find out whether all those models that said the savings would make up for it were right, or not. Yeah, sure, let's bet the entire world economy on that.
Delightful. There are several ways to deal with it. I do this:

- For READING mail, my offlineimap knows about multiple accounts and puts them in different directories on disk

- mu indexes the PARENT of all those directories, so as far as mu is concerned, there's a single mail store with ALL the mail. The m: filter can be used to select specific directories, which map to different accounts here

- For SENDING mail, mu4e knows about multiple contexts that are detected based on rules you can set (for instance, when replying to email, it'll set the context to whichever account the mail I'm replying to was sent). Or one can set the context explicitly with the ';' binding.

Works quite well
What we really need to do is to figure out ways that reduce the need for all this transportation. When you look at it from a distance almost none of it makes sense. The only travel that really needs doing is people working with physical stuff, moving the goods themselves around and leisure travel (and that one is definitely not a must but it is hard to make a stand-in experience that is comparable to the real one). Most commuting is - or rather should be - totally useless.
No worries!!

Also, don't let all the very tough feedback on here get you down. Tough crowd on here!
Would you like to help introduce this change to Rails? I'd love to help if it's feasible.
There's a sidewalk I walk down, it's quite narrow and runs along a shoulderless road with a steady stream of cars whizzing by at 50 miles an hour. I think to myself 'how much more or less dangerous is this than walking along the edge of the Grand Canyon? One misstep and I'm toast. One misstep from one of those cars and I'm toast.'

We have a hardwired respect for heights, but at no time in our evolutionary history did we ever have to deal with the kind of speed cars move at. So we look at a 10 foot deep unprotected hole in the ground and instantly think 'Hey, that's a hazard', but we don't give nearly enough consideration to speed, and as such 2 million people each year who are killed and injured in US motor vehicle accidents, and we just sort of shrug our shoulders.
Humanistic Intelligence: The Symbiotic Future of Machine and Human
I can't quite tell if you're being sarcastic or not. If you are, credit to you as you fooled me.
> The arctic will be policed by the American's and Russians

As it always has, because we don't have the millitary power or population to defend any of our own territory. The US does that for us. It's unfortunate Canadians have been unable to expand in our own territory over the few hundred years Europeans have been in this place.
Any pointers about the approach used by this tool to catch leaks?