skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Congestion is just what happens when too many people want to use a system and you're not willing to deny travel to some of them.

Congestion absolutely happens on trains. Just look at the New York or San Francisco subways during rush hour. The first and most obvious form is that you'll spend the first few train departures in "line" to get to the edge of the platform, then a couple more for a train you can physically squeeze onto.

The more insidious one is that public transit operators respond to crowding by increasing frequency beyond what their signaling technology can support. Even after you make it onto the train, you'll spend most of the journey stopped on the track waiting for the train in front of you to move.

You can solve congestion in any transportation system by enforcing a low enough number of simultaneous users, forcing the others to not travel, or use some other means. We seem least willing to do this with trains. Transit authorities are seriously thinking about congestion pricing for freeways, airlines raise prices at popular times, but rail systems are working to attract more ridership even as they collapse under the weight of their already-far-too-high ridership.
Yeah, I do mean the whole package. I have a copay too and I maybe shouldn't worry about it, but I do have a fear that using insurance too much for routine stuff will bite me later. $20 isn't much, but the doctor's office charges $100 for that, and I'd love to chat like twice a month. I assume that I end up paying the full price eventually. As it stands I make it in once or twice a year.

Even if I paid full price without insurance, $200/month for a doctor's attention and advice isn't that much, it's less than insurance, so maybe I'm irrationally afraid. But either way it's still part of what's keeping me from doing it. That, and if I call for an appointment they ask what's wrong multiple times. They de-prioritize scheduling for appointments when nothing's wrong, and they assume it's a one-time event. I feel like there is a non-negligible social disincentive built-in to calling for help when nothings wrong.
Expense is only half of the problem. The other half is utility. There is virtually zero utility for building high-speed rail through the central US.
The universe is made of information.
Your reply didn't look like it was restricted to discussing only inter-city travel.
In Europe there is a huge tendency to switch from cars to public transportation. Parking space in the city has become really expensive. New roads are built narrower and narrower in favor of walk-ways and bike lanes and to slow the driving speed down. In Austria there is a decline of about 1% of car owners each year.

The US has enough space for gigantic parking lots and wide roads. They don't have the same problems as in Europe. That's a huge difference that you are missing there.
The important part:

>“When it’s in the air, it actually looks like it’s further away, then it lands and it looks closer,” he said.
That is assuming the term retrograde is a bad thing; often it is not. I might have chosen a better word, and am curious if there is one.

This retrograde notion is based on a lot of evidence and personal experiences. For example, in a conversation I had with someone a few years ago I asked what is wrong with the way things are. That person told me he wants things to be like the way they were in the 1950s, referring to the sense of community, job opportunities, and social mores.
Soda Can Sound Effect – Opening and Drinking a Coke (Headphones)
Open source: http://www.piwik.com
i think we can all agree that the main issue (in america) is population density (lack thereof, could the system ever pay for itself?) and the american suburban lifestyle not being compatible with high speed rail
vancouver seattle portland sacramento sf fresno la san diego is a perfectly workable corridor. at 200mph SF to LA would be a 2 hour ride, perfectly competitive with air if done right.
Want a morning routine? Live somewhere that doesn't disrupt and energize/enervate your evening routine.

Live somewhere where you can leave a window open (seasonally) and wake up with the birds and the weather.

Live somewhere that doesn't suck you into another schedule.

Then, let nature take its course.

Of course, our modern world makes this varying degrees of impossible, for many of us. And we compensate. And end up with what we have.

For me, I'd be much more of a morning person, if I didn't have the neighbors and neighborhood from hell.

So... context? Be careful of your choices. Seemingly simple ones, can have very big implications.

P.S. This is my experience. Not necessarily everyone's.
Read what I said. The "end user" doesn't care in the slightest about source access. Everything the GPL is concerned about only matters to other developers, not to end users.
My view is that the root of this is the quote 'All models are wrong but some are useful'. I dont think youll get something which descries the universe completely which is less complex than the universe itself. However maths can certainly describe parts of the universe more simply (but not completely).
That's universally ignored on HN. Almost nobody on here ever wants to talk about the fact that ~97% of all the people that were put into prison under the war on drugs over the last 40 years, went into government prisons to benefit government agendas & employees. It's very, very, very aggressively ignored here, and the sole response you'll usually get if you do bring up the actual facts of the situation, is heavy downvoting (you won't get much discussion unfortunately).
I think there'd be riots if any US city proposed class-segregated seats on its public transit system. Though I would love it.

I'd pay almost as much for a guaranteed seat on BART as I would for a car.
Yeah, you need a ladder or something to climb up or pull up and then you will see things right. Or something.
It is. For some reason people focus on private prisons. Government run prisons aren't much better.

Afaik, my state has no private prisons. They do have 25,000 prison guards who are a powerful lobby in the state legislature.
> The wealthiest of the wealthy 0.1% have profited immensely, the lower half of the world's population has been lifted out of poverty, and this has all come at the expense of the American blue collar worker.

Correlation doesn't mean causation. The blue collar workers of America have lost purchasing power. That is a fact. Chinese factory workers are better off, that's another one. But blue collar workers from other countries are better off than their American counterparts. How's that possible?

Health care, education, name it and you will see that don't work anymore. War again drugs, a complete disaster. But that's because the 0.1% stopped paying their fair amount of taxes and have converted the public services into their own private business in name of a "small government" while these same rules don't apply to them because they are "too big to fail". And has nothing, or little, to do with Chinese factory workers. Americans have voted for their own government to not help them anymore. It is not just poor people that suffer that lack of services but all the general population, except for the 0.1% that has money to pay for it all.

America have grown a lot in this past years, redistribution of wealth has failed. The 0.1% talks about not wanting a "class warfare" while fighting one.
For sure I would hate working with you
Part 1a.

By this point Microsoft had also supplied the BASIC for Perkin-Elmer's very expensive Model 3600 "intelligent terminal".

These were more than just terminals capable of limited client-side processing for time-sharing systems. As stand alone desktop units they were powerful enough for scientists to acquire data, store it, process it and/or control data-intensive instruments which a year earlier had required a large non-desktop host, often a forklift model.

The 3600 was the first desktop to actually resemble an early IBM PC, horizontal unit having two prominent 5 1/2" floppies, and with the detachable keyboard (also introduced softkey F-row) & monitor.

Other than that the box was simply a microprocessor & memory with two RS-232 ports (known as serial COM ports ever since later release on IBM PC's), and an external instrument connection, not supposed to be expandable or upgradable internally.

ROM bios booted (without a floppy) to a novel Disk-Based Operating System known as the Perkin-Elmer Terminal Operating System (PETOS) where a few of the DOS commands were available from ROM, but the remaining majority of the commands were expected to be present on a floppy residing at DISK0. DISK1 was expected to usually be employed for application program & data storage.

These were proprietary Perkin-Elmer programs to interface with their own scientific instruments but many users wanted to develop their own programs in BASIC like you could on the competitive Hewlett-Packard equipment using their built-in HP BASIC.

The team that had designed the 3600 had of course been separated into numerous more rewarding projects.

Anyway Perkin-Elmer got Microsoft to provide the BASIC for the 3600, and and as we all gained deeper knowledge of PETOS by operating this equipment, it really helped later when the IBM PC was launched because its DOS had such an uncanny similarity.
Not really true, pretty much every intra-regional trip would be well served by high speed rail. Seattle-Portland, Charlotte-Atlanta, Minneapolis-Chicago, etc.

All of these trips are currently frequently taken by car because flying is a nuisance and takes a lot longer than just the flight duration itself.
At European rail speeds, a train from Chicago to Minneapolis --- which, as a Chicagoan who likes Minneapolis, I wish existed! --- would take 6-7 hours. A flight from Chicago to Minneapolis takes just an hour and a half, and there are so many of them that catching one is no harder than catching a train.

On the list I provided, where do you see major opportunities for us to build out rail? I know that there are some! I just don't think there are many, or that it will ever make sense for us to have a densely connected HSR network like Europe.
>Threads where that happen invariably turn into insidious attacks not just on everyone purported to have whatever condition we're discussing, but, really, on everyone with mental health concerns of any sort.

You're probably going to think I'm crazy for saying this, but I think events like that are borderlines trying to drag everyone else down to their level. "Normal" people don't behave like that when others are trying to have a civil discussion that involves mutual exchanges of new ideas and information. You don't look crazy when you make everyone else look crazy as well. They're nuking discussions that could cause them to question themselves as self-defense, so they don't have to deal with them in the future.
> as was Donald Trump

>The notion of no longer blowing up the Middle East and treating Russia as a villain, was impossible for them to stomach re Trump,

Ah, yes, which is why he's threatening North Korea, attacking airfields in Syria, selling weapons to Saudi Arabia (which is currently in a war with Yemen), bombing in Afghanistan, in his own words giving the military "total authorization", authorized a raid in Yemen, and the list goes on.

You were _sold_ no more nation building, by a man who has interests in having his fingers everywhere in the globe. That you bought it hook, line and sinker is yet another problem.

In the same way, the Vietnam war was reasonably popular at first. It was barely around 67 and after countless deaths that the opinion was overwhelmingly negative, forcing the US to go back tail between its legs.

Maybe Americans no longer want war. Every single leader they are electing certainly doesn't share that opinion though. So, either they actually quite enjoy playing world police, or they're quite frankly so manipulable it becomes scary. But go on ahead and blame "the globalists" and "the deep state" (which, intended or not, is very much an InfoWars term, not exactly a reputable source), I am certain that'll do a lot of good.
Seems the FTC should step in here.

Oh, wait. We have a "pro business" Administration and Congress.

So, the big boys get to throw their weight around.

bah

P.S. These "big boys" should have to compete for truckers' services. Just like everyone else. On an ongoing bases... not some one-time commitment extorted solely to their advantage.
See downthread about Minneapolis-Chicago, which I do not think makes much sense:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14679127

I don't dispute that there are pockets of the US that would be well-served by rail. Maybe SEA-PDX is one of them! Note, though, that neither Seattle nor Portland are in the top 10 economically most important US cities.

I'm not anti-train. I love HSR. I wish we had more of it. But I think there's a solid reason that we don't.
Ehh, i don't buy this. It may be true for continental rail but not regional.
That all came about because Java/Swing sucks!
The promotional video mentioned is beyond parody: https://youtu.be/u9InW0nbi0U

Among many other gems, it's narrated by a guy with a strong Borat accent and actually used the words "lobster-shaped".
I'm nowhere as involved as you are in HN, but I can't help but notice your obsession with karma and leaderboards. What gives?
There are way more than two cities in the US where it's reasonable to not own a car. What makes you say it's only two?! Just because you can't imagine doing it doesn't mean that other people aren't perfectly content to do so. Here are some cities that I happen to know of offhand where people I know live perfectly "normal" (to use your word) lives without cars, and this is just in the northeast of the US: Boston, NYC, Jersey City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, DC, Alexandria, Bethesda, and Arlington.

I can easily afford a car, but I don't own one because I don't have need for one very frequently, so it's simply cheaper to rent when I need one rather than have to worry about owning one 24/7.
Elon Musk's efforts to break us out of the simulation [1] will be much harder if he can't find a suitable buffer overflow to exploit.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/janetwburns/2016/10/13/elon-mus...
There are several reasons more passenger rail doesn't happen.

Generally the passenger rail proposals are illegal because they fail some now 100+ year old laws on cost/benefit analysis originally enacted to throttle bankrupting the US from building water projects to make the deserts bloom when the US had lots of blooming land not in deserts. If you own some desert and can talk the Federal Government into a big water project to make the desert bloom, then you can get rich, but the US could go broke doing that.

Well, continually, any honest cost/benefit analysis dooms any Federal subsidies for passenger rail.

There was a big example in Baltimore: They built a subway. Big subsidies. The system was done but not quite carrying passengers yet. I went to a lecture on the economics. The cost/benefit solution, even counting the construction cost as $0.00? Sure: Brick up the openings of the subway and just f'get about it. Why? No way could ticket prices pay even for routine operating costs.
Fair enough, I'm very sorry about the crisis and hope it works out okay.

I 100% agree with your calling out constant sexualization of women as a major problem that permeates the industry, so I don't think we're really that far apart. At least on my end any disagreement mostly centers on the role that education will play in mitigating the side effects, which is fine; even if it doesn't help as much as I hope it will, I'm still happy to see the progress that students make as a result of my work, and I can't blame anyone for being skeptical about the ultimate impact.

So no hard feelings, and I apologise if I came across as argumentative. It does occur to me in hindsight that especially in the context of this article, my comments could be construed as defensive of the industry status quo, since "it's the pipeline!" is too often used in that way. That's not what I intended at all, I'm sorry I failed to make that clear. I think we really are on the same side here in terms of goals, if not tactics.
Every commuter rail system I can think of provides seats for passengers.
That's hardly related to privatisation though. Railways are not that profitable. The government could up subsidies if it wanted to to reduce ticket prices without nationalising the routes: it already enforces price controls.

One reason those routes are so expensive is that UK rail is in many regions frequently at or over capacity. Supply/demand does its thing until prices hit the caps. This is especially true around London. Price controls always cause shortages and in this case it's a shortage of seats and investment in capacity upgrades. Seems people prefer that to more expensive tickets or higher taxpayer subsidies.

Also the infrastructure is ancient - the steam locomotive was literally invented in the UK - and investment was largely abandoned during the decades of government ownership. The current railways often have infrastructure in them built a century ago.

Finally, some lines actually pay the government money rather than receive subsidies.

I don't think the UK position is wrong. It just means people who choose to use the railways instead of driving or moving pay more of the costs. Seems fair.
> Air routes are more flexible than rail routes.

Except for having to build an, uh, entire airport.
Are the sexual harassment cases related to women receiving less funding? Intuitively it might seem likely, but the recent stories have been about sexual harassment, not about likelihood of women receiving funding. It could simply be two unrelated issues - and even if they are related, VCs being sexually interested in a female founder might not decrease the likelihood of investment.
Thanks for that. Very interesting.

On the first one, I assume we are still talking hand-generation\coordination of the procedural bits. I was waving my hands at possibly learning the topology of those bits, possibly even from recognizing them as being reproduced [inefficiently] in a trained NN.

I don't think I've ever pondered that second technique before and it's very intriguing. Is there a canonical best-of-class in that category? Offhand, it sounds brutally hard to do.

Also, I think DeepMind might have published something on an NN that learned to write a procedural program that wrote a sort algorithm. Is that related?
> Before you make any statements about his this could potentially suppress voices and opinions, you can always make your own site.

Social media allows you to use a pseudonym which makes it possible to share an opinion (and thus, to a tiny extend, shape society) without the people who know you in "real life" learning about it. If you have a personal website you have, by German law, to publish your name and address on this website. As a result, people can google what you write.

So if you want to discuss an opinion that people you interact with in real life don't accept you have to accept that they could find your posts. This, naturally, could have a chilling effect leading to you not writing about issues you care about.
Something like 40 tons, 80,000 lb max loaded. But more like 20 ton average cargo payload (5 axle).

https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/reports/tswstudy/Vol2-Chapter3.pdf

As for speed, it's interesting to compare trucks with slow steaming.

> Slow steaming refers to the practice of operating transoceanic cargo ships, especially container ships, at significantly less than their maximum speed. An analyst at National Ports and Waterways Institute stated in 2010 that nearly all global shipping lines were using slow steaming to save money on fuel.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_steaming
This is a matter of belief then? Interestingly the philosophy of preferring simplicity came from the need to characterize the holy trinity ! As a small thing that lives on a small planet that orbits a small star in no particular place at no particular time what imagination makes you think that things won't be hidden from you?
LA is not such a great example anymore because metro/metrolink/flyaway + uber can take you anywhere you want to go from Union Station these days cheaply, sometimes quickly.
Anyone who can benefit from Hacker News can figure out how to filter posts for themselves.
As a Linux user, I mostly go for 'curl ifconfig.co' ;)
>> This feature should be safe in principle

Famous last words. :-)
6-7 hours can't possibly be correct, that's how long it takes driving.
Every commuter rail system I can think of has at least a 2:1 ratio of passengers to seats during commute hours.
Hey! Java/Swing is one of the most respected platforms for running universe-type applications!
The trend of the past is the result of medicine and medical development that did not in any way attempt to address the causes of aging. Benefits have resulted from either (a) inadvertently slowing down the damage accumulation, or (b) compensating in some way without addressing the damage. In either case the benefits are small in the grand scheme of things. 0.1 years of life expectancy at 60 with every passing decade is not a large outcome, and we should not be surprised to find it small given that treating aging as a medical condition hasn't been the goal of research or implementation.

Trying to keep a damaged machine running without repairing the damage is expensive and futile. How far does changing the oil in a car or pressing the accelerator harder get you if you never fix anything that goes wrong in the engine? Similar situation.

The future will be radically different because researchers are now resolved to treat aging as a medical condition, to investigate the causes, and to intervene. The debate now is over the best way to go about it, and alas most of the research community remains fixated on the path that will cost a great deal and achieve next to nothing, which is to say efforts to alter the operation of metabolism so as to modestly slow down the aging process. Calorie restriction mimetics, autophagy enhancement, and etc.

If you want better results, you have to look to the rejuvenation research of the sort carried out by the SENS Research Foundation, the Big Pharma groups clearing amyloid, the new senescent cell clearance startups, etc. Slowing aging by altering metabolism is the expensive road to nowhere. Repairing the causes of aging is the more efficient, faster road to rejuvenation of the old and the prevention of aging.
Here's a project that might be interesting.

https://github.com/postgraphql/postgraphql
Your critique of Hoffman seems like a tactical disagreement rather than a strategic one. Hoffman is standing up to be counted -- just as you have, repeatedly. I wish both of you would get cut a little more slack. At least neither of you is minimizing the problem.
> developing economies are going wireless/fiber and skipping the "legacy" generation, the US should be doing the same with MagLev/hyperloop

Opponents of HSL will not only rally against it, but also kill it by promoting a more expensive solution via another channel. The US isn't going to cut military spending so it can build hyperloop instead of HSL.
Correlation doesn't mean causation.

Everything is linked in the economy. When I say that it's come at the expense of these workers, I don't mean somebody made the call to take money from them and give it to Chinese workers. I mean that in the grand game of musical chairs, they are the ones who have been left standing.
Doesn't this just suggest that computer vision is practically impossible to perfect, and that cameras + LIDAR would be far better for safely driving a car? You need actual distances to objects, not just fuzzy error-prone inferences.
You are my people.
<shrug> I corrected a post saying "X is impossible in C". That's a different issue from whether X is as efficient in C as in assembly language.