skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's failing to understand what Amtrak is, what it does, or why it exists.

There are effectively 3 types of services Amtrak runs.

1. Long distance trains. These are the 1-2x a day or less cross-country runs, the legacy of pre-1971 history, effectively. Because they run 95%+ on freight company rails in most cases, they're often very late, very slow, and often do not provide a very practical service or even come close to generating reasonable revenue number. Amtrak runs these at the behest of the federal government, who picks up the tab for their losses.

It's easy to say, "cut these!", and not necessarily wrong. But while it's not a very good service, it gets Amtrak into 46 states. It's often the only transportation option of any kind in those rural areas besides driving yourself. Even buses don't serve a lot of the places Amtrak rumbles through. The losses are relatively small per year, and as such Congress is generally loathe to kill service that affects THEIR state. That's the political angle.

The other angle is that it serves as a placeholder of sorts for the future. It keeps the idea of long-distance passenger rail in existence. It keeps the right to run that 1-2x a day service over those lines active. It's a lot easier to negotiate to run a couple more trains a day than it is to negotiate to start running on a line you don't run on. It's a lot easier to get community support to expand/improve a thing that exists than convince people to bring what they've never had before. Many recent expansions of the state supported services (more on what that is next) have been over that.

2. State supported services are what they sound like. States pay Amtrak to run service. States may buy equipment that Amtrak runs or it may be part of the general Amtrak fleet. States pay for the operating costs/number of trains, capital improvements, etc. Amtrak serves as the operator fulfilling the contract. Many of these provide "real" service that is regularly used by people where it operates. Some states are putting in enough in upgrades to even get time-competitive with driving. There is no reason for the federal government to be altering how Amtrak handles this. If states want to, they're perfectly free to hire someone else. Attempts at that have mostly not gone well.

3. Northeast Corridor. Pretty much vital to the Northeast, without exaggeration. It moves more people than planes or buses do between most of the 1-2 city hops. It's badly in need of billions of $ of improvements, which is the primary issue with it, not Amtrak's management of it. Even as it is it's critical infrastructure. It turns an operating profit, but doesn't cover capital expenses. It would probably be a legal and political nightmare to try to split it up among the states or come up with a successor given how many states are involved in it, it needs to be one entity.
I'm not sure how efficient hydrocarbons are as storage media; the point is that eras of geological processes have already done the work of storing energy in that form.
Interesting how Blackberry-née-R.I.M. is also making driverless vehicles a major priority now.
This is nonsense. A state can privately own land, and you need to own capital in order to lease it in the first place. And since when does renting not count as a form of ownership, albeit with restrictions? You're not allowed to do certain things in the US with your land, does that mean that the US has no private ownership?

I do not wish to defend the CCP, but Communism is more than just "no private property", and you're wrong on the point on private property, at least coming from the Marxian sense which the Communists mean.
Would be interesting to know how many of these points map over to the insurance landscape in Europe? I know next to nothing about either but, from talking with Stateside friends, have the (possibly wrong!) impression that the insurance market in Europe is less sclerotic and a little more modern/competitive/innovative.
Affiliate networks will tell you what companies are willing to really pay for a lead, customer, etc. You really need to know BA's churn and LCV etc., though.

Nutrisystem pays $140 to affiliates per new customer and gets about $12 in revenue daily from the customer. That is sort of relevant.

I wouldn't personally put any money into Blue Apron. They are hiding their churn and dressing up their numbers. I suspect they will blow up or fizzle out.
Why would a reverse split affect employees? Is it only in the case that an employee thinks:

• I have 10,000 shares

• GOOG is $1,000

• We're going to be the next GOOG

• 10,000 * $1,000

• I'm worth $10m

I don't see how anything related to % of ownership or intrinsic value would change with a reverse split.
I don't believe I've commented on a more-women-in-X topic before, here or anywhere else.

Claiming that those who make certain types of comments on certain topics are always trolling, and that other factors (like politeness, etiquette, or larger points raised) are not relevant, is conceptually similar to claiming they suffer from original sin.

In other replies to your comment, I'm indirectly being accused of contributing to "pervasive misogyny and bigotry", while others are trying to devise mechanisms to ban points-of-view they disagree with. I have said nothing to warrant such a claim and those who make such claims are bullies. I suspect the style and tone of your moderation on this topic is encouraging the bullying.

I don't envy your job and the trash you have to deal with, and I generally appreciate your approach to moderation. In particular, the previous trial moratorium on partisan political discussion was an encouraging experiment.

This kind of topic suffers from the same problem because two different branches of philosophy are at play:

A "founders conference" would likely be classified as a discussion of morality, and you can guess the topics: what is the best approach to starting a company, what lessons were learned, and so forth - all topics that relate to the question "how do I make the best decisions for my life and career aspirations?"

A "female founders conference" more likely belongs to politics: what is the relation of the individual to society, what rules should govern those relationships, and (implicitly) how do females counter/exploit unjust bias against women in order to be more successful founders? These are questions ill-suited to online discussion.

I've skimmed through the talk and nearly all of the content relates to the moral question, not the political one. I think this means the conference organizers themselves don't even take the "female" part of the title seriously.

And so I think the fundamental source of disagreement, the "[insistence] on relitigating this from first principles", stems from the (imho accurate) perception that this is an attempt to force a political view on an fundamentally apolitical topic.
65 dimensions, not including income, but so many things in life do end up correlating to wealth.
Why are so many so afraid?

Would they be afraid of a "Black Founders Conference"?

What about men tackling issues like work/life balance and getting connections to their families? A "Men as Parents" conference?

I am a long way away from San Francisco so I really have no idea what the ins and outs of the local culture are, but I see this same fear here. Not a nostalgia for old gender roles, but some sort of fear about being left out. It is changing, but has a long way to go.
In the case of natural gas power plants, aren't they (at least some of the time) built due to the need for 'peaker' plants? That is, if there's a sudden surge in demand (which solar can't react to, for obvious reasons) or an unpredictable drop in solar output (e.g. a cloud moves in between California and the sun), gas plants can quickly fire up to cover the output gap (much quicker than, say, coal or nuclear).

Wholesale electricity prices should naturally spike during these times as well. Demand is temporarily outpacing supply. That's the market in the very short-run, I guess. In the long run, I don't agree that we should 'listen to the market'. The market doesn't price in externalities like increased infrastructure costs (which are usually worn by taxpayers) or greenhouse gas emissions (a global negative externality) unless the government steps in to internalise these costs.

I honestly don't know much about California's electricity market, but it seems like no one has been 'listening to the market' for quite some time now: https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2016/01/15/california-... , http://www.gosolarcalifornia.ca.gov/solarwater/index.php , http://www.gosolarcalifornia.ca.gov/about/nshp.php
This is normal language. Were you around in the late 90's / early 2000's? Things were even worse.
There's no need to be snarky, it's almost as if you're reading comments just to find something like this to comment on. The "racism card" you refer to is when an opponent will use a word like "racist" to shut down his opponent. That's not what's happening here, and further, it's just a generic adhom.
I think it should be justifiable for me to downvote this on the grounds of uncivil remarks against the entire nationality. However, I am not going to do so because I acknowledge that this is a common mind sight of a Westerner and it is not really you fault to think that way.

Let's keep the discussion civil and hopefully we all can get something out of this.
Every time the fall of Nokia is mentioned I always retell the feelings I had sitting in Ruholahti, Helsinki on February 2011- the Friday of my first week at the company; and hearing the news that R&D was shutting down in favour of Windows Phone.

Many considered it an inferior product, many had just lost the work of their lives. Most just went to the bar across the street.

I feel the heart and soul of Nokia, just like those engineers, is off of the main building somewhere. Getting drunk and telling stories of how great things were and could have been.
Not sure if LTV for blue apron is in their IPO docs or not, but to put that number into perspective: their cheapest plan is $60 per week, so if they hold onto a customer for 6 months, that $1560. 20% profit margin would mean $312. No idea if those numbers are anywhere close to correct.

The magnitude of CAC and LTV are only meaningful together. A ferrari dealership might have a $5000 cost to acquire a customer and that would be a bargain, because their LTV is $250k+.
A HK resident recommended to me Alice Poon's "Land and the Ruling Class in Hong Kong" to understand the malfunction in land development that this sort of cronyism delivers; I found it a worthwhile read, and readily recommend it to others.

[0] http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2948872-land-and-the-ruli...
Wow, the author is not exaggerating when saying it is a scam.

Looking at the .feedback page for Stack Overflow, it says at the top, in fairly large letters "We make Stack Overflow, where the world's developers get answers, share knowledge & find jobs they love. Also proud builders of the @stackexchange Q&A network."

Then at the absolute bottom, in small, washed out print it says "Disclaimer: This site is provided to facilitate free speech regarding Stack Overflow. No direct endorsement or association should be conferred."

So, users are not supposed to confer that a page claiming to be by the makers of stack overflow, are associated with SO? Beyond any reasonable doubt, the people behind that site are trying to scam visitors.

If the creators of the .feedback pages are also the TLD owners, it seems obvious to me that they should face legal charges and be stripped of the TLD.
> ...it doesn't enhance your career to say "we kept everything working", and building a better solution requires much more investment and has a much longer-term deliverable that it's almost impossible...to cut out a significant portion of the budget for.

The next time one of your managers takes this approach, remind them Amazon did not accept "we kept everything working" as good enough infrastructure. We're in a unique period in history where nearly every part of the infrastructure of future generations is up for grabs for re-imagining, because most of our civilization's infrastructure does not embed computational capabilities. Does your management want the status quo, or do they want 10X or better improvements in cost and utility that can be sold as the new infrastructure?

The last time Amazon did that to a widely-accepted status quo infrastructure, we ended up with AWS.
> that can reveal your percentage of test coverage.

Many folk only try line coverage, which loses indicative value as you approach 100%.
OK, maybe it sets a Canadian precedent limiting what can be ordered from Google in such cases, but it sets a nasty (informal) international precedent of random country X strong-arming a company from country Y to censor content in country Z. That's why Google opposed this motion and that's what many others, including me, have an issue with. I don't live in Canada, don't do business with Canada and don't want to give a rat's ass about Canadian courts and their rulings.
>The UK isn't as free as many other Western nations.

This is certainly true. I will note that in 2009 Parliament demonstrated that it has no problem with making illegal mere possession of certain drawings (even if you drew them yourself from your imagination), and there have been proposals by MPs to illegalise (with penalty of prison) possession of certain text.

>I'd argue freedom has more to do with economic prosperity

What kind of economic prosperity? Some (such as Proudhon) would argue that freedom is in fact impossible under a system which advances private ownership.

>Founding documents rarely mean anything when it comes to actual law.

This is false; the law which I mentioned the UK making above was implemented in the US and stricken down by the Supreme Court on constitutional basis.
Yep... it's amazing they could screw that up. Can anyone recommend a replacement for the Withings scale? All I want it to do is record my weight every time I step on it, send it up to the Internet, and let me view it in my browser and iPhone.
I'm having a lot of fun lately thinking about everything in cryptotokens:

Everyone gets 3 basicMealTokens and 1 basicFun token.

However, in SF, there are only sfMealTokens which require 20 basicMealTokens.

In Vietnam, 1 vietnameseChickenPlatterToken is only half a basicMealToken.

Tech workers are paid in techWorkTokens which can be exchanged for 200 basicMealTokens each or 100 basicFunTokens, or 1/1000th of a Tesla token.

Token transfers have friction so it is advantageous to maintain a surplus of tokens most easily transferrable (least hops) to what you want.

To ease this, SF maintains a sfBasicToken and makes the market to transfer tokens from all over the world to sfBasicTokens. sfBasicTokens have an advantage in that you can pay for things easily instead of paying 67.34 redditStatusTokens.

Some old geezer is willing to sell his house for a legacy usdToken, a token so old it had a physical representation and no historical memory.

The basicFoodToken ideas doesn't pan out. SF starts giving out sfBasicFoodTokens instead. However large numbers of people realize an arbitrage mistake and live like kings in Thailand, taking advantage of the buying power of sfTokens due to the Thailand people wanting to make it big with their startup dreams in the Bay Area.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> Chinese student-spies on American University campuses is a well documented phenomenon [0].

Why "Chinese student protesting" is labeled as "spying". Dalai does want to make a part of China become independent. Without going into the debate into the legitimacy of this claim, can a country's citizen express their own emotion through the right channel? What makes them spy?!
Original author here...

Let me ask you - and by "you", I mean everybody reading this - a question.

If you had poor design or refactoring skills, how would you know?

Let's just say you've finished working on some code that involved writing new code. How do you know whether it's well-designed?

Well, you start by using your own sense of what is good design. But all of us can only see the things that we already know about, which us thinking that the code has decent design is only a sign that it is up to our level of understanding. This is a fundamental part of how knowledge works.

Code review can give some additional design feedback, but 1) code reviewers generally don't have time to give in-depth design feedback and 2) "you should redesign this" is generally not well received (see previous point about everybody thinking they are good designers), and I both have to work with my teammates and their comments factor into the kind of review I get. So, code review is not a good way to improve design change, even assuming that you have people on your team who have useful design advice to pass on and you are in the kind of environment that lets you be thoughtful about design.

If you are in a team with decent designers and your team pairs, then you are in luck; you have a good chance to expand your design skills. Leverage this at every opportunity.

Finally, it is possible to spend time (almost always your free time) learning more about design, doing katas, going to code retreats, etc. This also works.

And I'm sorry if this sounds arrogant; I've tried to find other ways of saying it.
No. In theory, that new gas plant is "planned" and replacing aging capacity, while meeting expected demand.

Rates are separate.

Many power utilities are granted a monopoly, especially the transmission (high voltage, long distance) and distribution ("last mile" / neighborhood wires) horizontals as they're true natural monopolies.

In exchange for that concession, their profits are capped. The cap is a function of their "rate base" -- i.e. qualifying capex -- and an approved rate. These rates are adjusted periodically, requiring public utility commission (State) or FERC (federal) rate setting sessions.

For example, "Total Revenue Requirement = Rate Base [assets] × Allowed Rate of Return + Expenses" [0]

Without having looked into this, it's easy to over-estimate how easy (hard) life as a public utility is.

[0] http://blog.aee.net/how-do-electric-utilities-make-money
Props for mentioning Carlota Perez. I'm familiar with her Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital (which is quite good). Are there any other works you'd recommend?

http://www.worldcat.org/title/technological-revolutions-and-...

There've been a few HN submissions over the years:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=carlota%20perez&sort=byPopular...
The fact that cops would want to be aware of people using the Dark Web doesn't seem particularly surprising or alarming. When you're looking for bad actors you build up a profile based on previous bad actors. I used to work in fraud prevention, and we found, for example, for our particular product if someone opened an account and then changed addresses within two weeks, there was a pretty good chance it was identity fraud.

Of course there's nothing nefarious about opening an account two weeks before you move to a new place, but it would get you looked at because so many people who did were fraudsters.

The goofy thing about this story is the fact that they circulated a leaflet listing something like this as suspicious behavior. They're going to get buried under bogus tips from nosy neighbors as actual terrorists avoid doing this kind of stuff publicly.
Great article. I want to call out one point:

> The more life-like a space appears to be, the more we begin to expect it
> to allow for the affordances we have in real life. But games only enable
> players the actions developers explicitly allow for and implement.
> Unfortunately, that aspect of game development doesn’t scale with
> computing power in the way art has.

This is one of the reasons I got out of the game industry. Schatz (and many game devs I've worked with) seem to take this as an immutable fact when, really, it is a choice developers have made. They decided to make games with realistic artwork and limited interaction. The realistic art is nice, but when everything is a polygonal shell with baked in lighting, then the set of things you can do with it becomes very small.

The computer doesn't force you to build games that way. The best counter-example I know is Minecraft. In Minecraft, the art is decidedly unrealistic, bordering on abstract. But, in return for that, the world is incredibly interactive. The entire world can be generated procedurally and freely remolded by the player.

When you play many games today, you will never ever do anything a level designer and game programmer didn't explicitly implement support for. You may fail to advance to the next scene if you don't push the right buttons at the right time, but the overall play experience is not too far removed from a film (and so many game designers out there have deep film envy). That's fine, but it's not super appealing to me.

In contrast, when I play Minecraft, I play in a world no one on Earth has ever seen, and I build things no one has ever built.

But many game developers, and especially producers, don't like games like that. One problem is that, like the film industry, big game companies are making bigger and bigger budget games. The main problem becomes controlling risk. A realistic on-rails game where the player works through a single scripted narrative is a controllable experience. You can reliably estimate how much players will like it.

With emergent and procedural gameplay, it's really hard to predict if the end result will be fun or not. For every Minecraft, there's a million sandbox games that don't have everything balanced just so to get it to hang together in that magical way (see: Spore, No Man's Sky). That's a risky bet for a producer deciding what kind of game to make next.
I have no doubt that PDQSort is faster than the other sorting algorithms, but before I swap std::sort for it in serious commercial apps I'd like some proofs and battle testing.

That said, if it really is an in place swap for std::sort I'll try it out ASAP
Dubai Police to deploy robotic patrols
As someone who doesn't have familiarity with Withings products but is considering buying one of the Nokia scales - how did they screw it up? What would you want a "smart" scale to do that the Nokia doesn't?
Some more info about the Monsanto thing, which I hadn't heard about; I believe this is what the parent is mentioning:

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/03/14/business/monsanto-roun...
It's an incentive problem. Calling these things management problems (while technically accurate) is, unfortunately, unhelpful. People keep complaining about it, but the structure of our political system is such that it will never get better.
> Sounds like a narrative that Beijing would very much support, Mr. New Account.

I'm offering my opinion on this issue. If you don't agree with me on the real reason for HK's decline, explain your point, or pick holes in my arguments. I don't see how labeling what I said as "approved by Beijing" - disregard how ridiculous it is - automatically disqualifies them.

Also, as to Mr. New Account, I use a throwaway account for the exact reason that I figured some people would get offended by what I said.

> Get people to hate their local govt and appeal to a higher authority for support. Brilliant.

The snarkiness in your comments really made me hesitant to reply, but if you are still interested in a civil discussion: please recheck what I wrote, and point out exact where I suggested Hong Kong people should hate their local government, and appeal to a higher authority.
Techmeme's version of this story's headline (they link to the same article): Dubai Police plan to deploy self-driving miniature vehicles that will use biometrics to scan crowds and identify criminals and suspects