skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's too late for rail. Yes, we lost a generation of development in rail. We also lost a generation of development for pretty much every other transportation industry, and thus our whole infrastructure. The article briefly touches on it. Transportation in general hasn't been a priority for at least thirty years. I'm not worried about rail. Rail is dead in the US and has been for a long time. I'm worried about our highways. That's our infrastructure core, without which the US cannot survive. Not building rail projects in the US is pretty normal and on par for the downward trajectory we're on.

Not building and maintaining highways and bridges shouldn't even be an option. While some upper-class, rich people can afford to live in our cities, they are a huge minority and most people rely on cars and highways. Outside of a couple of cities, good city public transportation simply doesn't exist in the US and won't exist anytime soon.

I think we need to be realistic as to what is possible in the US. High speed inter-city rail isn't possible. And even if it is, can it compete with the price of plane tickets? Doubtful. Giving our cities good public transportation isn't possible. It may have been possible in the past, but not the last few decades. Having room inside a city for all who want to live there most certainly isn't possible. Building roads and bridges has now become almost impossible in many places. I have to wonder what is the plan for the US transportation infrastructure. As far as I can see, the plan is to let it deteriorate until it doesn't exist anymore. At least in that sense, it's consistent with education, social programs, and the rest of our crumbling society.
It's nothing like insulting. Think of it like absolute and marginal costs. You have absolute infrastructure -- the sum total of all your infrastructure -- and you have marginal infrastructure -- bits and pieces that can be added and removed. If you have no Redis and then you have Redis, NewAbsoluteInfrastructure = OldAbsoluteInfrastructure + Redis, and Redis is your marginal infrastructure.
> The problem is that a train running through Texas is useless unless you want to get to a specific city that the tracks actually pass through.

This argument ignores the new and existing population clusters that form and grow along a transportation link. You only have to look at interstate highway system and how new population clusters formed and existing clusters grew along the links once interstate hwy were built. Just reviewing the I-35, I-10 in Texas will show you that. Same can be seen with local subways and light rails systems. The clusters near stations grow faster than rest of the city.
He seems obsessed with the problem and and can't cope with the guilt of his own thoughts, he should see a therapist to learn about how to deal with that. To say someone to see a therapist is not an insult! It's mental health, it's fine!
This is exactly the point that keeps getting overlooked. Traveling from DC to Philly, or Philly to NYC, should take 45 minutes or an hour, the same way traveling from Beijing to Tianjin or Shanghai to Hangzhou takes 45 minutes or an hour. HSR isn't for connecting regions to one another. Air already does that well. HSR is for drawing cities within a region closer to one another.
Having lookup instead of send as the primitive operation also allows you to generate code like this for the call site:

({
static SEL last_isa = NULL;
static IMP last_imp = NULL;
if (object->isa != isa){
last_isa = object->isa;
last_imp = lookup(object->isa, sel);
}
last_isa(object, selector, arguments...);
})

(modulo the fact that you cannot generate this by dumb string substitution without compiler extension like gcc's ({...}))

Smalltalk/X takes this to the extreme by compiling all sends into code like:

{
static struct cache = {.imp = &magic_global_method, .class=NULL}
cache->imp(&cache, object, selector, arguments...);
}

And generates something like this into every method prologue:

if (cache && self->isa != cache->class){
cache->class = self->isa;
cache->imp = lookup(object, selector);
return cache->imp(NULL, object, selector, arguments...)
}

It looks convoluted and uses one additional word of stack space per call, but does not contain any unpredictable indirect branches in the fast path (and in fact reduces overall code size as it can be expected that there are many more sends than methods).
The US should take leadership ideas from China? Uh, without trains, how would an average Chinese person travel 100 miles? Sure, something on wooden wheels. That is, notice that China is very short on private cars.

Last I heard, in Belgium or some such, sure, can buy a new car. But it will have to be imported, and the import tariff is 180% of the cost of the car. Now understand why the EU is so big on bicycles and trains?
Practicaly, it does not matter whether he was wrongly victimised or not. It is irrelevant whether she wrongly accused him or whether he was collosally out of line. It matters whether he can talk about "formative stage of career" without sounding like a colossal weirdo. Most people can't.

He was looking for advice how to make his situation better. This is not it.

Also, there is big difference between saving mental resources by not thinking about impact of your words and spending effort looking for "a chance to talk to a nontrivial percentage of the staff and explain ...". The latter does not save mental energy. The latter is major project instead. Nor does it build trust. Characterising it as causual "saving energy from managing petty issues" is ridiculous.
Wallaby damned.
*citation needed

The congested road network still happens with Google cars.
I assume that anyone interested in a BLAS library is already well aware of what BLAS stands for. But I agree, the site does need some love.
Show HN: Letsencrypt (and other) certificate dashboard
What makes it fun for a kid to pick up a device and play with it often comes down to "a bunch of my friends also have this same device and so my software can be used by them and it makes them happy", not "I get to sit alone with the Pi that my parents got me and play with technical stuff". This is the same argument for why platforms with more market share get more innovation as there are more developers all over the world who think "if I bother to build that, there are people out there who can use it and might even pay me for it". That's why the programmable TI calculator ecosystem was so powerful, why jailbroken iPods as a development platform for kids was so powerful, why having open PCs with compatible open expansion ports was extremely powerful, and why it just isn't sufficient or really even terribly relevant that there exists an open platform but that the platforms people have are open.
But if we cut military, they'd then be much more fiscally responsible and not have to admit that they'd "lost" trillions of dollars that they can't account for every, oh, decade or so.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/23/politics/us-army-audit-account...
Some people don't want to market. Surely this would be a victory for them despite having higher profits available.
Unity will be starting human trials this year, so far as we know.

Oisin will follow later this year or in 2018, if they keep to the standard way in which things work in biotech companies following an A round.

I have no idea what SIWA will be doing; they have been around on life support for a while, and now resurrected by the newfound money coming into the field. I'd imagine that their next step would be some form of trial, though it is unclear as to where exactly they are in their animal study schedule.

There are people self-experimenting with senolytic drug candidates now, though not in any way that will provide useful data. If you draw the line at candidates for which there is in vivo evidence in mammals, you're left with just the chemotherapeutics and foxo4-dri. (A pity that fisetin has no in vivo evidence yet...). The chemotherapeutics are worth skipping over, since they are ugly chemicals and really only a starting point for the development of analogs without the horrible side-effects, and foxo4-dri hasn't been tested in any formal way in humans yet.

At the pace at which new drug candidates are emerging and being tested, a couple of years from now would be a good time to be self-experimenting.
The differential in costs between living in the city core versus in the suburbs is much different for such cities, however. It may well be reversed entirely, as in many small cities that don't suffer from bad traffic, living in newer suburbs is more desirable than living in a potentially decaying urban core.
Cutest kid ever
This article is about New Zealand's schools but This is absolutely correct in the US too. We are seeing the results of programmers not understanding or caring about what their code skills can do. Viruses, black hat hacking and privacy invasion are partly due to people in the computer industry not understanding or caring about ethics.
None of my computer courses included ethics as part of the lectures or reading. But I've taken business courses that at least touch on ethics. And if you are planning to get a degree in Law,Medicine,Genetics and business you will be taking courses that teach ethics. You can even take complete courses on the subject to meet requirements but in the computer sciences field it's not standard or required.

With the impact computer technology has on our society we definitely need to start teaching it in schools.
Different europen countries have different laws. But basically it sounds like a more elaborate bullying.

Thank you for the answer.
I read the page. Somehow I didn't make the connection that Alice must be a company name (it could have been a person's name, though a first name is weird indeed). Still doesn't give me any context though.
How? CRISPR is overhyped. We don't even understand aging sufficiently enough.
What systems are you thinking of? Because every commuter rail system I can think of has seats for almost everyone.
Thanks for sharing.

I am ready to launch a startup and currently trying to figure out what to focus on (so many ideas!).

I posted an "Ask HN" earlier today. Wondering if anyone might have some thoughts or advice on this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14677939
AMD Takes 10.4% CPU Share from Intel in Q2 2017
Given the fast lookup time, it would be useful if you could provide a JS API fot synchronous loading.

Essentially, a blocking script in the dom <script src="...api.js" /> that prepopulates the window object. With clever error handling, this could improve perceived performance significantly.

A few questions:

1. What differentiates you from ip-api.com and other providers?

2. Do you use MaxMind?

3. Is there an option for no-throttling? 100s of simultaneous requests?

I aggregate multiple IP databases for my SaaS (https://www.geoscreenshot.com) and I need highly performant / reliable IP look ups.
There are many ways to quickly get and use a GeoIP DB like MaxMind, most requiring way less than 20 minutes. This is just one example of something I started using recently:

docker run -p 8080:8080 -d fiorix/freegeoip
curl localhost:8080/json/1.2.3.4

(Repo: https://github.com/fiorix/freegeoip)
Slow Steaming
In Common Lisp, setq is just a variant of setf whose argument syntax must be a symbol. However, that symbol may be a symbol macro which expands to a compound form! Through a suitably defined intermediate symbol macro, setq can operate on any place on which setf can operate.
I can't reply to all comments, so since you posted first I'm replying here...

It's a minor thing to learn a criminal skill that lets you con your way into a couple thousand dollars. The combination of knowledge, connections, moxie, and motivation to raise an ill gotten 37 million dollars are another thing entirely. Not anyone can just say "oh sure I'll lie my way to 37 million". Given the skills, time, and dedication it must have taken to get this far by a person with these talents, could have been used to be reasonably successful in a whole host of careers or ventures. Perhaps not 37 million effective, but enough to live comfortably and happy for sure, without the constant fear of the long arm of the law creeping up behind you at any moment.
You can also stick a butter knife in the meat. If it's goes in with little resistance, it's done. Or you can just cut a chunk off and eat it. Don't necessarily need a thermometer to cook meat. Those aren't always accurate. Hard to beat taste and feel.
Just have persistent objects (or strongly typed values). LaTeX documents, tables, images, videos, songs, computer programs, etc. have very little in common, so why make them all files?
The obvious counter-example are humans.

On a more realistic level, stereoscopic vision seems like a pretty decent way to get distances.
va_* is not a simulation. It compiles down to the exact same stack accesses. There is no list. It is a plain C function. It is the same calling convention. No boxing.

This is plain false.
MTA, CTA, Muni, BART, Caltrain.
Yup, even other a lot of fixed broadband is moving to CG-NAT.

I wonder if having an IPv6 version would work a lot better?
Why would you _want_ a synchronous, blocking script in the first place?
It really wasn't that bad as a first job out of college. The travel was sometimes enjoyable, and I was really close with my coworkers, most of whom were of a similar age and place in their life.

As for getting the ax, that didn't happen to me, but even if it had, I've never had problems finding a job, nor have I ever lived paycheck-to-paycheck. It'd be inconvenient but that's about it.
> Maybe sometime down the line we'd get something that resembles justice.

It will be welcome.

"The defendant enters a plea to the charges brought by the U.S. Attorney at a court hearing known as arraignment. More than 90 percent of defendants plead guilty rather than go to trial."

* http://www.uscourts.gov/about-federal-courts/types-cases/cri...

"In 2013, while 8 percent of all federal criminal charges were dismissed (either because of a mistake in fact or law or because the defendant had decided to cooperate), more than 97 percent of the remainder were resolved through plea bargains, and fewer than 3 percent went to trial. The plea bargains largely determined the sentences imposed."

"[...] the prosecutor-dictated plea bargain system, by creating such inordinate pressures to enter into plea bargains, appears to have led a significant number of defendants to plead guilty to crimes they never actually committed."

* http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/11/20/why-innocent-peop...
Unfortunately majority of existing rail lines and nearby lands are owned by freight rail companies. So repurposing them for HSR or passenger transport is an uphill battle. The areas where freight rail lines are shared with passenger traffic, freight gets priority making passenger trains unreliable, excessive delays and unattractive.
A pharma company was the largest donor to an anti-marijuana legalization movement in AZ.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/03/big-pharma-m...
>Fight dictatorial control with dictatorial control.

...You do know that communism advocates for a society where control is something done in collaboration with others? Because China, or the USSR calls itself communist does not mean it is. A simple reading of Marx & Engels' work would clarify that.
Poettering downvoted 5 (at time of this writing) times
I don't smoke/consume either and I have to say it's working pretty well here in Oregon. More tax revenue for the state, fewer people in jail and so on.
That's not an answer.
Very much true, but doesn't get at my point.

In fact airports can be / often are built far from urban areas where land is cheaper and space is available not just for the runways and terminals but parking, cargo etc. While you want rail terminals to be in densely connected locations which are more expensive and more difficult to network to.

But my point is that you can relatively easily fly from one airport to many others. For example, the under-construction California HSR goes from LA through Bakersfield in the Central Valley up to SF and then Sacramento. If Fresno in the Central Valley grew, you could expand its commuter airport and then it would be directly linked by air to Burbank, San Jose, San Franciso etc as well as points outside the state. While the cost of adding an HSR terminal in Fresno could be large, especially if the rail doesn't run nearby (as it happens a terminal appears to be planned in Fresno, but the point remains).

I'm still a big supporter of HSR but I recognize the trade offs.
The distance between major cities (the US has more than 50 cities with at least a million people alone) in many parts of the US is the distance between Paris and Rome, and they are pretty evenly distributed across the continent so you need mesh connectivity. In dense corridors that are closer together, they do use trains. The western half of the US is also extremely mountainous, which makes it a little more challenging to install a HSR mesh with many links approaching a thousand kilometers even though that is where some of the country's biggest cities are. Most of those links will never be economically justifiable given the amount of traffic that goes over them.

Because of the distances involved, air travel is much more economical in much of the US. Almost all of my trips to random cities in the US are at least a thousand kilometers; I think there is only one major city within a thousand kilometers, and that is connected by rail which people use.
> You may not realize it, but I'm doing you and lucb1e a favor by telling you this.

I read the article before commenting, but a simple first name doesn't tell me anything so I asked. I find the way you wrote that condescending so let me do you a favor by telling you, have a care what assumptions you make.
A plane means not just being trapped, but also air-tightly locked, fastened to seat, and brought to a 30'000 feet altitude.
Objects are linked to each other in different ways, so some kind of database (I prefer graph databases) with a proper search engine aware of different object types (instead of just grep) would be better.
I've written a fair bit about it. We use it at AppNexus internally for our UI's, and it simply maps back to a REST API. Since each API has its quirks and oddities, it's a nice abstraction layer for consistency.

http://joelgriffith.net/lessons-learned-wrapping-a-rest-api-... For starters
you know when you first read that you think - damn straight you can't parse html with regex, but as it goes on the idea gets strangely enticing. I mean maybe, with the correct rituals, and a gun and a willingness to fight with ancient evils you could maybe parse some html with regex. A sort of Lovecraft/Action flick.
I wish more people would think about possible solutions like this.

Unfortunately from their (fine) ideals bitcoin and the other crypto-currencies are just becoming another tool for criminals and speculators and someone needs to find a solution if its going to become a help rather than a hindrance.

And don't worry about the down-votes, I'll take some off you by saying those are mostly from speculators who don't want to see their tower of card collapse.
You're being remarkably disingenuous; please consider your comments an example of deleterious politics.
> The company’s “Large Animal Detection system” can identify and avoid deer, elk and caribou, but early testing in Australia shows it cannot adjust to the kangaroo’s unique method of movement.

In Sweden there are elks and deer but not so many kangaroos. :)

An intelligent system needs to learn. To learn it needs examples.
Is there any evidence that "teaching ethics" works? I wouldn't expect it to, but I'd be happy to be wrong.

> Viruses, black hat hacking and privacy invasion are partly due to people in the computer industry not understanding or caring about ethics.

Yes, but the breakdown is .1% not understanding and 99.9% not caring (which typically takes the form of rationalization).
And in larger Chinese cities, every HSL station is connected directly to the city subway system (or has the subway station under construction). That also means you don't have to allow extra time for contingencies, which usually means arriving early at the airport.
If US wants to revitalize mid-America, it has to build HSR through mid-America. The history of interstate highway system is good primer on it. Otherwise mid-America will empty out with time.
> None of my computer courses included ethics as part of the lectures or reading.

Ethics was a required course for me back in 2005. Looking at ABET requirements[0] for 2016-2017, ethics is still a requirement. I'll admit that more than 1 course would've been nice, but it is part of the required curriculum in the US.

(Also required was a course in doing presentations, which was actually quite helpful!)

[0]http://www.abet.org/accreditation/accreditation-criteria/cri...
Yep, passenger miles Amtrak rail in the US is about 1% of air.
> my family first, country second, and global "community" last.

Well, in many cases (but not all of course), people who put "country" first, get much better outcomes in the end. In fact, if you look at the poor half of the world -- it's where everybody mostly put themselves first.

So I argue that for the best life quality, there should be
some balance between the two. Although figuring out the best balance is a very hard problem.
I keep seeing these popular articles about efficient new electricity generation technologies, but they never say how much electricity is generated, so it's impossible the evaluate just how useful the new technology is.
If transactions have perfect record keeping and are always traceable, then why stop with just blacklisting. You could go much further and correct all sorts of frauds and injustices going back through layers of transactions.

But we don't always do that in the non-cyberspace world even when it is technically feasible. If a car is stolen and it changes hands ten times, then yes, it'll get returned to the original owner. But not for fungible transactions like in securities. I'll give you a concrete example of where it doesn't happen:

Canadians experienced a multi-billion dollar stock fraud due a company called Bre-X[1] that found an enormous gold deposit that turned out to be a massive lie. After the fraud was exposed and the stock had collapsed, the brokerages, exchanges, and the Ontario Securities Commission could have reversed all the transactions one by one until everyone who was unjustly enriched had their profit taken away and everyone who lost money was made whole.

All the data to do this was available to the brokers. There is no such thing as anonymous holders and anonymous exchange of shares. If Mr. Wilson was left holding 1000 worthless shares when trading was halted, you could look at the records and see that he bought it from Mr. Coolidge for $85,000. You'd seize $85,000 from Coolidge giving it back to Wilson, and return the 1000 shares to Coolidge. Then you'd look at Coolidge's transactions. You'd unwind all the transactions to the beginning of the fraud. But the brokerages and exchanges did not do this!

You're asking for stricter controls on cryptocurrencies than exist for fungible meat-space transactions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bre-X
Google maps says Minneapolis to Chicago is 409 miles, so three hours seems like a pretty achievable goal. Also, the flight is 1.5 hours, but the actual travel time is probably more like 3-4 when you factor in getting to the airport, waiting for the TSA, etc. Plus, you're moving around and being annoyed for a lot of that time, whereas you can plunk down on the train and nap/work/etc.

I think aiming for a comprehensive network right out of the gate is bad idea. Instead, build it now where it makes sense now...and build more later where/when/if it makes sense later. You could even add some fairly short routes. If someone can get Boston to Providence/Wooster/Manchester down to ~20-30 minutes, it'd be a huge win for that entire metro area. People already do those commutes but they're on the longish side.