skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One reason to be a bit more optimistic is Texas (http://www.thsrtc.com/). Their equivalent plan to California's is loads cheaper thanks to their more agreeable geography (plains, mostly).

More importantly, the lighter touch of the state government means rather than do a full-on government build and operate (ala California/Amtrak), they're looking at private build & operations under a long-term lease, with the government providing liability limitations and eminent domain, in return for owning the infrastructure after the lease expires in some decades of operation. This means the builder is subject to market forces: they can only recoup their build costs within the lease window by getting to operations as quickly and efficiently as possible. The incentives are the opposite for government construction: the milk flows during construction, so there's a disincentive to ever finish, and when things go over budget, it almost always means more money, rather than anyone cutting their losses.

To get a sense what a difference this makes, consider that the NYC subway system was built by competing private concerns under the long-term lease model (ala Texas), between 1905 and 1940. In 1940 the system was unified under government control (ala California), and basically the system was frozen in time, with no expansion happening in the 70 years since (see: http://www.diametunim.com/shashi/nyc_subways/).
Ive seen many articles talking about code cowboys, or the lone rockstar programmer. It might just be the places ive worked at but I have yet to see anyone who fits this description. An anti social arrogant person who makes a lot of mistakes would simply find it hard to stay hired in todays comp sci world.
I find that AntiRSI not only prevents me from developing RSI, it also keeps me focused by making me take breaks: http://download.cnet.com/AntiRSI/3000-18487_4-85044.html
@newsyc20 includes links to the story itself and the Hacker News comment page for that story.

Sold! Not having links to the comments when following @newsycombinator always perturbed me.
If US rail freight is so great (which I do believe it is) then get the f*ing trucks off the interstate highways! Let's load up the rail system with the freight it was meant to serve. If not, then make way for the passenger trains, and the tractor trailers can have the roads, which they destroy with every wheel turn they take!
For the opposite reason that nursing is a taco fest.
That's not entirely true. If this were purely a web-accessible blog, there's no reason you couldn't encrypt/decrypt this in the client (sending and storing encrypted text). You'd have to throw out email posting in that case though.
It's a good thing you don't want to argue about heroin, because you're pretty wrong:

> You can always ween yourself off heroin by checking into rehab - you just need to have the will to do that one step.

Rehab success rates are so abysmal that most will not even publish their results; Googling, I see generic rehab rates of 2-20%, and heroin is one of the harder drugs to quit. Apparently half or fewer of addicts will even finish rehab (http://ezinearticles.com/?Drug-Rehab-Success-Rates&id=14...), much less actually become drug-free.
Ah. My understanding was that the "not charging" bit also applied to renting rooms while present. Which, if you're right about it not applying, means that I entirely agree with the law and don't see why there's so much fuss about it. Thank you for clarifying.
> Not just drugs, but all the different things pg cites as addictive. Plugging in to older value systems is one way of putting a brake on those impulses. This, of course, is true of many other religious and cultural systems that have stood the test of time, not just Christianity.

I hope I was not the only one who instantly thought of Neal Stephenson's _The Diamond Age_ and its phyles (especially the Victorians).
This was mentioned in the article. A number of trucking companies are doing this, and just using trucks for move it around locally.

This has increased congestion on the railroads, and the new passneger traffic will make this even worse.

It really is worth reading the article, very informative. I remember reading some ridiculous statistic about how cheap it is to move a ton of cargo in the US before, now I have a few more details.
The argument that I usually have, and constantly resist, is that a) generally women just aren't as interested in CS as men, and b) that's ok, so c) why give out scholarships to make CS artificially attractive, and d) if the industry isn't suffering for the lack (arguable) what's the big deal?

But I think that the people in CS are being degraded. The women have to deal with a constant stream of rubbish, and men are being conditioned to provide it. It appears that some people are not being given full credit for their skills and work, and in an industry powered by kudos as much as money that should offend everyone.
Generally I think if you're traveling city to city, you'd fly/take the train then use public transport at the other end. You only really need a car if you're venturing away from cities. Like there would be absolutely no point in driving to Paris and looking for a parking spot there when I could get the Eurostar straight to GdN. I'd even rather fly to Paris than drive, and no-one does that anymore...

Smart train operators like Eurostar realize that they are virtually airlines and behave as such.
What's your point?

I could characterize nutritionally-void foodstuffs like coffee or tea, or expensive entertainment like TV or the Internet, as 'rich people stuff' too. If you're in the West, you're 'rich people'.
Well done, great concept and already I see a practical use for it in my life (tracking a new fitness program)

Thanks guys
Speed of progress wouldn't be a problem if people stuck to a sane and consistent version numbering system.
"…dominant culture that discourages women from even entering a computer lab filled with sweaty nerds, much less think about joining them."

You have a good point here, but it's not just that they're sweaty, it's that all too often they're actively hostile to women – whether it's sexist jokes, an obsession with rape in DND games (all too frequent) or just the way they seem shocked that a woman could actually be good at coding. Makes things a bit unpleasant, yeah?
"I like video games" often translates to "I want to work in the video game industry" often translates to "I'll learn how to program."

More generally, however, enthusiasm for video games makes kids keenly aware of the hardware that makes it possible. (Even at the age of ten, kids will get into console wars citing which has the faster processor, etc.) Having that technical background from an early age, however rudimentary, makes gamers more likely to feel comfortable with programming.
According to Apple it voids your warranty. http://www.electronista.com/articles/10/07/26/apple.says.sta...
It doesn't, but it probably is an entry point, especially for older (PC-based) generations: involvement in tech & computing, desire to understand the underside of that world, modding (especially with full-blown programming language e.g. Python for Civ IV, Lua for WoW), involvement in communities more likely than average to be in tech and prog, etc...

Playing games other than twitch-shooters also feels a lot like programming in many ways: you have to discover the rules, features and limitations of the system and work within them to reach your goal, and all of these tend to be rather well defined.

I can only speak for myself, but video games were indeed what birthed my interest in computers, and later on in programming.
Are We On The Cusp Of A Jailbroken App Revolution?
A "sausage fest"? Classy rhetoric! Is nursing a "tits fest" or elementary education a "vagina fest"?

It'll be great when intelligent people can stop identifying themselves or their sense of humor by their genitalia, race, or any other physical characteristic that has little to do with how good they can be as people.

I agree that women might not want to hear "dick jokes" or "be groped" but most people don't regardless of gender. It's not a male/female dichotomy we're dealing with - it's a respect/idiocy dichotomy.
No. You need only realize that regulation doesn't automatically mean that a market is "shut down".
Not necessarily to skill, but to exposure to programming in general.

I'd wager that people (kids) get interested in programming by using technology and wondering, "Hey, how does this work?" I'd further bet that this occurs far more often in connection to video games than, say, Word or Outlook, since video games are fun and creative. For the past few decades, far more boys than girls play video games. Hence, by college, more young men have been exposed to programming than young women.

Now, with the advent of the web (which is more or less gender neutral) and social gaming, I expect to see an increase in the number of women getting into programming over the next decade. Nowadays, it seems to me that there are more "fun" things that programming has made possible which have yet to be skewed towards the Y chromosome.
"What's a good rule of thumb for knowing how much content you need for a minimum viable product?"

Analytics can tell you if people are showing up.

From a strictly guerrilla perspective just add your own like a religious fanatic. Everyday just devote X number of hours...and treat it as important as the tech development itself.

Other than that,you have to realize a lot of successful companies are started by founders (serendipitously) branching off of prior situations that are uniquely specific to them. There is a good tech nation episode where they talk about how the "guy in the garage" narrative of many big companies (that I will leave unnamed) are largely a myth - these people all had connections and worked in places that allowed for them to blossom ideas in environments that were conducive to their success. This isn't to suggest that being a guerrilla, an engineer or idea man isn't part of it, of course it is, just that there is more involved on a case-by-case basis.

So "Yelp" may have had any number of things to get the ball rolling that is under the radar.
I think Tom the lawyer is a fictional character not least because he is described so sterotypicaly and what makes him be at the top of his profession is also sterotypical.
Delta’s SkyClub Site Reimagined To Be Less Barf Bag Worthy
Dapper + Yahoo Pipes = Same result, allowing customizable score filter, customizable sorting, customizable date thresholds, etc. In about 30 minutes.

If a single person replies to this comment, I'll implement it.

EDIT: T+46:
As promised, but without the sorting or date threshold. Sorry.

Change the parameters to meet your needs. Supports min/max comments/points. Sorts by points DESC. Go play with the pipe if you want :)

Apologies that it doesn't tweet you.

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=ceb3c855a339606d3c...
At 33k/mo in servers costs it doesn't even remotely cover the servers.
US and UK have pretty much the same legal system. The French legal system is inquisitorial and pretty much all of Europe or is it the world except for the common wealth?
ugh. I really can't help but cringe whenever anyone tries to throw their hat into the ring and take on this problem, even if they have an inside take.

CS education also focuses a lot of effort on puzzles and very abstract concepts when practical applications where you can see the why and how might work better for women (and a hell of a lot of men). I like yummy algorithms, but we could make CS education more accessible by putting them in context.

I kind of wish this had happened when I was doing CS. What does that say about me? (I'm a guy)

I think these kind of over-generalizations about an entire gender do nothing but contribute to the PC echo chamber.

I don't know what contributes to the gender disparity, but I can say that I have plenty of male friends who also can't really contemplate being a programmer, and for many of the same reasons that are cited that women may not be attracted to the profession... I think it can be an intimidating profession no matter what your gender- anything like coding that has such an insular culture is the same.... Maybe it's just a chicken and egg problem.
> The fact remains that computing power, bandwidth, and storage takes money, which is easy for your average hostile-to-ads user to forget.

Uh... therefore reddit gold. That's the point.
after a few generations the "gap" would very likely be as good as gone.

lulz
I do think Texas's plan is one of the most promising, but I suppose my guess is that it'll still take a long time, partly because it's been looking promising for a long time now: the first feasibility study was launched in the 1980s. The state actually awarded a contract to a private group to build high-speed rail in the Dallas-San Antonio-Houston triangle, under terms like those you discuss, in 1991, but it was killed, largely by Southwest Airlines lobbying, in 1994. I went to high school in Texas 1996-2000, and a new high-speed rail plan was being discussed that entire time too, but the talk never went anywhere. In the early 2000s, it was revived once more, this time as part of an ambitious Trans-Texas Corridor (which would have had freight rail, high-speed rail, car-only freeways, and truck-only freeways), but that died a few years later as well, partly due to a nativist backlash against its role as the "NAFTA superhighway".

Now there's yet another HSR plan, separated back out from the road plans, which might work this time, but I probably wouldn't put any money on this being the year the 20+-year impasse is broken. Honestly I haven't seen any of that supposedly lighter-touch, actually-functioning Texas state government on this issue, just a multi-decade series of special interests and politicking resulting in no rails being built.
Conde Nast isn't involved in Reddit's operations.

Also,

> Actually they're even lower

Yeah I like that you declare knowing the costs of Reddit's servers.
> We are veterinary technicians not veterinarians, dental assistants not dentists, medical assistants not doctors.

Women are now a slight majority of medical students and ~95% of nurses. Women make up >75% of the students in veterinary school, and around ~50% of students in dental school.
Also of note : according to http://gamegirl.blogfaction.com/article/107252/top-7-statist... and http://www.grabstats.com/statcategorymain.asp?StatCatID=13 nearly 40% of video game players are women.
I'm less certain these day, where video games are so sophisticated that no neophyte can hope to replicate them; but I grew up in an age where kids learned to program writing Zork-clones in BASIC.
It's not saying that they're wrong, but that there are factors beside sexism and bigotry that contribute to the problem.
sure, why not. Not sure what dapper is required for, couldn't you doo this all in pipes?

I use pipes for a number of my applications, great stuff yahoo.
Yes. Its a diary.
The gap would already be dramatically reduced to within inches rather than metres. In effect it would be gone, although it would very literally be so if culture and conditions were rectified in a way that hasn't yet been tried in the United States over the past "150 years" (as if anything substantive was done in this time whatsoever). Of course, you can always disagree and argue from the basis of genetic determinism, but we all know the evidence for that is inconclusive and your "thinking" that it isn't won't make it anymore real.

Oh, and just to make clarion your intellectual dishonesty, what does all of this have to do with Founder immigration? Nothing. What is it really about? Probably racism.

Have a nice day.
I'm an UX guy. I have some research in this area, and I was planning to make a desktop version, but I luck the desktop development skill. So i headed towards a webapp, bespin powered. You can't however beat a desktop app in this space.

If you would like some help, the email is in my profile.
> On the other hand, he assumes those women didn’t deserve to be sent to JSConf. Why should he assume that?

Utter crap. That’s clearly not what the critics are concerned about. The women may indeed deserve to go — but no more than men who are not being offered the same grants. This is what is objectionable. This, and the implication that women need pushed into the field or artificially assisted, strike some as sexist.

While she does make some good points towards the end, this whole piece is strewn with similar assumptions of male sexism, and is devoid of any realization that some perceived affirmative action as reverse discrimination.
> but does Reddit even allow photos anywhere besides thumbnails?

How is that even relevant? Images cost in bandwidth, not in computing power.

> Does Reddit find things only specific to your account

Uh yes, on every single submission and comments. The admins clearly stated that what used the most resources was the voting system. As well as every single user (whether you marked them as friends) and the list of links itself, which is extracted from the user's own list of reddits.

There is barely anything on a logged in user's page which isn't at least in part specific to that user's account.

> I could really go on for a long time

No, I don't think so, you've been 0/everything so far, it's time to stop.
The Google Group is free, and has worked fine so far.
The antonym for "sausage fest" is usually "clam bake" or "taco party".
For some reason, the background picture is distorted when remote mouses hover it (Chrome 5). Anyone has an explanation?
None of which in any way contradicts what she said.
pacman_util.js is missing from your tree, and I don't see anywhere mentioning what it might be,.
Where to buy a Sports Shoes Shaped Hard Case Pouch for PSP? 
A few days ago, i found that my classmates owed a PSP looked like a sports shoe, i liked it very much! I didn't find it in strores,
so i decide to buy it from a website. Here are the websites i found:

http://www.everbuying.com

http://www.dealextreme.com

http://www.davismicro.com

http://www.lightinthebox.com

http://www.dhgate.com

http://www.tradetang.com

http://www.chinanewfashion.com

http://www.popbuying.com

http://www.goodjobchina.com
......
If you had bought from any one of them,please give me some advice! Thank you!
You shouldn't. It probably isn't the case.
To coding skill? It doesn't, necessarily. But that's not what she's arguing; she's saying that there's a correlation between playing video games and interest in (and exposure to) computers & coding.

I don't know if that's as true nowadays, but back when I went off to school in '97, video games were essentially the only way a kid could get exposed to computing in a way that was fun, interesting, and challenging. They directly led to my interest in programming.
When we truly treat people as individuals, we'll accept whatever the situation exactly as it is.

The diversity we find in humanity is exactly what has been required for us to get as far as we have. Its an absolute necessity, yet many are troubled when we see different types of people pursue different things. And just as many are troubled when other individuals pursue things they're "not supposed to".

I think we all need to learn to go with the flow.
Would moving reddit to a cloud will make it cheaper?
I did read the article. :-) And absent from it is the fact that the federal government gave the railroads the land in the first place. I love The Economist, but leave it to them to bemoan regulation, but leave out a simple and fundamental fact like that.

The article even mentioned how new tracks are being put in for long distance passenger traffic -- which will not impact the freight trains -- but that local traffic has to be on freight lines, and this does impact freight because of freight's erratic schedule. But perhaps with more use freight will be less erratic. Perhaps the best solution is to move freight transfer stations (where rail freight moves to trucks) out from cities, and allow passenger service closer in. This does not help freight that has to go through the city in the first place. But, if we can move off of coal a little faster, then maybe we will have the capacity for increased freight and passenger rail service.
Instead of programming, video games got me into PC networking. In 1998 (I was 14 at the time), my friends and I had LAN parties because our town didn't have any sort of high speed internet. We each chipped in $50 and bought ourselves a "beginning home networking kit" which had an ethernet hub and a couple of NICs. I spent an afternoon getting our little network running so we could Quake. I was hooked.
Seems like you put a lot of effort into this reply.
> I ran a web app with identical pageview numbers

That's cute, but was your web app as hard to cache as Reddit?

Scaling a fully static website is trivial, and the more dynamism you include, the harder it becomes.

There is barely anything static on a logged in Reddit user's page.
Hardly anyone pays out-of-pocket for first-class tickets. I suspect 90% of premium cabin passengers are flying on their company's dime, have been upgraded, are using awards, or are non-revenue passengers. The few who pay their own way skew toward the investment banker side of things.
except for the whole women are "not doctors" thing.
Seychelles Honeymoon Package
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Safecracking for the computer scientist (2004) [pdf]
Yes, but 82.5% of female gamers are 18 or older, and they're more likely to be playing Bejeweled and such. The relevant time period here is during pre-college years, and the relevant video games are generally the ones that actually require the latest (or some recent) generation of hardware.

Casual games typically don't make you think, "Can I run this?" or "How would this be better if I had better hardware?"
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Furthermore, its needs to prove it's own viability via a business plan, a tax statement (that shows that it makes $x in revenues each year) etc. The latter portion is hard for a startup - since they may not have any revenues yet.

I was hired by the co-founder of my own startup (eduFire.com) in 2007 and transferred my H1 from my old big corp to the startup.

Things may have changed since then, or the case might be different b/c it was an H1 transfer, but our lawyer didn't need to provide a biz plan or tax statement to get the H1 transferred.
Thank you. This is the precisely the kind of advice I am looking for!

I picked up -How to prove it- based on your recommendation(your comments on bradfordcross's blog [on machine learning]and later on your blog)

Algorithms -by Dasgupta,Papadimitriou,Vazirani is the book i picked up (available free at http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~vazirani/algorithms.html). I understand CLRS is the bible (i own a copy),but I don't think I am competent enough to attempt it now(especially after my work with SOA,ESB and every other mind rotting jargon)
I felt this book to be digestible(atleast the first chapter). I could take a pause, think and continue from where I left. (please let me know if you have any cautions/advice regarding this book). With CLRS, I would have to pick and trace back every notation and come back.

Foundations of computer science - Aho and Ullman (available at http://infolab.stanford.edu/~ullman/focs.html)

I intend to finish these before end of this year. I have a (strong)feeling, I may miss this goal, hence the parallel study(shameful/guilt note - i missed the deadline last year). Will take your advice- work thru htpi first.