skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There have been efforts along these lines, but with big hairy projects that need to involve city planning, public transport, building and other big hairy parts... It's hard to get everything perfect.

Anyway, things like this are happening to an extent. Israel is currently well in a building boom. A lot of the new development within the Tel Aviv and Jerusalem areas are like this, especially on the outskirts of suburburban towns. 100 buildings on a couple hundred acres, near train stations. 50-100 families per building.

Some good, some bad. It's very land efficient, which is important considering population density. Its easier to plan, and produce housing stock fast.

Being big corporate development, it can feel a little soulless. You get high density on the outskirts of suburban towns, which generally average 3 stories in the older centres. Still, all the walkable, shopable, cafeable streets are in the old centre, not the outskirts regardless of density.

That gets to the last point.... there's a limit to how much these things can be designed. Architects sometimes seem to think (when they get excited) that peoples use of places is dictated by the design of those places. I think causation runs both ways.

Grafton Street (Dublin street often used as an example of walkablility) is a packed, lively, window shopping and street performance centre because of its culture. Pedestrian only, and all its things other physical characteristics got way because of the culture, not just the other way around.

Culture takes time, and is not always designable. This is a gotcha with a lot of big ideas in planning & architecture. Cities are how they are for reasons other than just buildings, often causation runs the reverse way...
Whereas it's more of a prime example of what's wrong with the resource curse.
That was a conversation we were just having today. We definitely went out further than was safe, simply because there were lifeguards on the beach. I've been to plenty of beaches without lifeguards and been far more risk-averse.

It wasn't a conscious choice. It was only something I became aware of once I'd had that dangerous experience in the water.

Risk management is a funny thing.
They're an advertising company that gets most of its profits by collecting personal information about people and trying to manipulate them into buying things.

Sounds pretty unethical to me.
I was thinking that too and had actually created a ticket for it https://github.com/jasongoodwin/emacs-elixir-formatter/issue... . I'm relatively new to elisp and this was a good way to jump in a little deeper - I'll try to tackle this soon. Publish it somewhere etc. I save on navigate away so that would be ideal for me too. I'll try to make that change shortly. Or feel free to make a pr.
I found this blog a few months ago and then lost it. Thanks for posting this!
Introducing the WhatsApp Business App
> I live in apartment above a restaurant. My phone now asks me to review this restaurant every time I come home

You think that's bad? I live above a head shop and google keeps trying to sell me bongs in ads because of it.
Have there been socialists blaming capitalism? I've only seen socialists, who previously touted the shining beacon of socialism in Venezuela, now claiming it wasn't true socialism.
As far as centralized companies go Google is one of the better ones.

Gonna have to ask you to define your terms here, pal.
You could always just return nan in that case, like for normal arithmetic.
Well, my memory is good enough to remember that in the pre-Google world I had no way to find out reviews of restaurants in a city I was visiting, let alone 'memorize' them.
> but it is formally allowed

Your correlation doesn't hold up because tax loopholes are not formally allowed. You call that out in your previous sentence by scare-quoting "allow". The inventor uses a formal system (patents). The company uses an informal system (tax loopholes). In the case of a formal system, you do not attack the inventor because he is just using the proper channel. In the case of an informal system, you do attack the company because the company is unethically taking advantage of a channel that shouldn't be there in the first place.
Ask HN: Best replacement for Skype
Skype just announced a significant (67%) increase in price for a SkypeIn number. The price increase together with a nearly non-functional user interface, a buggy Linux application and poor sound stability, suggests that it may be time to move on. What other suppliers have products that can be used to replace Skype?
... except top-level officials are constantly shuffled between posts in different cities/provinces they have no family ties to specifically to prevent such corruption.
Google's creepy, but it seems the author should be savvy enough to know that Facebook does a lot more than what is implied here. Facebook goes after you all over the internet whether you have a Facebook account or not and won't let you delete the dossier they have on you. I don't see much of an ethical difference between the two companies; they are full of people chasing an ideal of success that is opposed to mine.
About those empty skyscrapers i think in part they are a gamble on workers migrating from the interior to the coast.

But in recent years their government has started a program aimed at transferring some of the coastal activity inland.

How effective that will be is hard to tell, but there are already interesting stories of hotels that have entrances on multiple floors because the city was funded in a valley between multiple hills. End result is that new roads go between the hills on bridges, passing right by the hotel. Sounds like one crazy place to live.
It also wears said systems out faster and increases capital costs

This is a good point. When you purchase capital equipment, your incentive is to keep it utilized as much as possible to maximize ROI. That means you're going to want your self-driving car fleet parked as little as possible because when they're parked, they're not making you money. Now that the cars are driven far more than regular passenger cars, their maintenance needs go up.

So either these cars will need to be built to the reliability needs of over-the-road trucks, which will greatly increase costs, or their maintenance will have to be more frequent, which is even more expensive.
> Is this not in direct contradiction the base animal instinct of self survival.

What about the basic social animal instinct of co-operation and empathy?
Both PVA's are steps in the synthesis so it's extra amusing this time. The vinyl acetate is polymerized to polyvinyl acetate (PVA) and then converted into an alcohol (also PVA) because the vinyl alcohol monomer isn't stable enough.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyvinyl_alcohol
> So I deleted all my photos and stopped taking new ones.

When you're "deleting" things from services like Google Drive, it's better to think of what you're doing as "hiding things from yourself". It's unlikely that Google actually deleted that data in a way that prevents them from accessing it.
That's fair - thanks for the comment. It makes sense - then there are no opinions or variation so "this is the way" and all code looks like that.
>The median house in Lafayette costs roughly $150,000. A family living in this house would currently pay about $1,500 per year in taxes to the local government of which 10%, approximately $150, goes to maintenance of infrastructure (more is paid to the schools and regional government). A fraction of that $150 – it varies by year – is spent on actual pavement.

>To maintain just the roads and drainage systems that have already been built, the family in that median house would need to have their taxes increase by $3,300 per year. That assumes no new roads are built and existing roadways are not widened or substantively improved. That is $3,300 in additional local taxes just to tread water.

I've seen these figures before, and they don't make sense. It looks like he gets that $3300 figure by assuming that payments on infrastructure will double and infrastructure will remain at 10% of the city budget. But the more reasonable assumption is that payments on infrastructure will increase to become a larger proportion of the city budget -- particularly when we're talking about, say, sewers, which won't generate additional demand for policing or schools (or at least won't double it). If his claims were accurate, no suburbs so defined could have been built in the first place. At the very least it's annoying that he doesn't show more of his work, which is easy to blame on the fact that he obviously wants to destroy our way of life.
Server can't do anything. It wasn't informed. And it can't be informed reliably.
I have all my iCloud sync options off except for Find My iPhone, which isn't something I can do with Google - it'll automatically sign me into everything. And the sync options stay off, even though yes, they do pester me to turn more things on. (Meanwhile, I found this morning that my Chromebook, which I have specifically for high-security things like my domain name registrar and privileged SSH keys, has gone ahead and turned on sync for everything again, despite having turned it off multiple times in the past.)

Also, admittedly, part of the benefit here is simply that I don't use Apple services (e.g., I don't use Facetime), I use Google services. I'd get the same benefit if I were using any non-Google phone.
They're generated by the Maps app which is where you can then also see the result of that crowdsourcing.

You can disable them in Maps settings (or disable Maps app altogether).
> I really don't see a use-case for A from the consumer perspective. Why would anyone ever want such a notification?

Most people don't, but it's a game of numbers. If everyone gets the notification, then 0.01% start taking photos and populate Google Maps with the largest, live-est dataset of restaurant and business information in the world. Then all the consumers get access to this information in a nice format in their phone when it matters.

That's supposed to be the deal. Google is banking on this not being insanely annoying to most people, which, maybe is where they have miscalculated and made an error.
When I was a kid my family would often chide me for using "big words" and told I was trying to "impress everyone" doing that.

The truth is, I was just trying to relate something I'd learned and thought was interesting and every time that happened I was kind of shocked and left wondering how they'd missed the gist of what I was talking about. My own mother did it. I finally stopped sharing things I thought they'd attack me for like that.

Then, in the 4th grade the city I went to school in had all the kids in the district take a test to measure intelligence, though they didn't tell us students that was what we were doing. About a month later my teacher asked my mother to meet her. She told my mom that I'd tested the 2nd highest in the district. She recommended that I be bumped up a couple grades so I could learn more. My mother told her "No. He'll be in the same grade as his older brother and that will cause problems at home." She also told the teacher that she didn't believe I was "that smart".

My teacher was shocked by that. She pulled me aside the next day and told me about the test, her conversation with my mother, and that she was sorry that she couldn't do more for me.

I'd never given a thought about me being "smarter" than anyone. I knew that school was easy for me as compared to some of the other kids that seemed to struggle but I figured they'd get the lessons soon enough. I never talked to anyone in my family about it. I knew they'd just humiliate me if I did.

A few years later I looked into IQ tests and saw the Bell Curve Graph and where I stood on it. Since then I've almost never, ever, mentioned it to anyone but a very few close friends who are no doubt in the same general area on that graph because the first few times I did I got hammered on hard.

Just a few years ago (50 years later) one of my cousins came to visit where I live now and I started talking about something I'd just read and they stopped me right in the middle of it and said "Why are you always trying to impress everyone by using big words." Brought me right back to when we were kids.

I've always known I couldn't be alone with these kinds of experiences, and this article confirms that, but it got me to thinking about how little this has has been discussed and how this kind of exposes that it's probably a far more pervasive problem than we know.

I do know that over the years I've pointed out why something wouldn't work as planned and been told I was wrong and then later proved right. More than a few times it was an expensive lesson to be learned for those who ignored me. And pretty much every time I was hated for pointing it out.

I've never given any thought to the problem or how to fix it but it would probably be interesting to attempt to measure the costs and ponder solutions to it.
Hey, look, it's okay. You're most likely a good person. You're getting paid well, working on a world-changing thing, and have lots of smart people around you. Don't let one Internet comment ruffle your feathers too much. :)
Because if you turn it off in one place, it just starts happening in another:

Yah. I disabled Google Maps tracking, then Google Search started notifying me about places I was near.
Yep, this will start yet another bidding war on our area. For the last couple years we've had a constant back and forth of each region trying to claim the new FBI headquarters.
It did bring poverty down enormously. Even the current crisis hasn't put it back up to the levels it used to be at.

Moreover, the current crisis is simply a repeat of what happened in the 80s when Venezuelan "capitalists" were in charge - also caused by a plunge in oil prices.
Google Maps can be disabled just fine, on 5X or new Pixel XLs running 8.1.
WhatsApp API – How to Use the WhatsApp Chat API
Nokia (Maemo) - not really, it was more of a side project that worked pretty well for them and still would with such volumes as it got. They had a chance to turn it into something bigger, but waited for too long, playing internal battles between Maemo and Symbian teams, so eventually Microsoft came and pulled out the plug.

OpenMoko - not really, it was major mismanagement in other areas (and some poor luck) that killed it, but AFAIR production volume was actually being predicted quite well.

Firefox OS, Ubuntu Edge - sure.
Anyone who does SoC evaluation or large purchases know that any synthetic benchmark are BS. Every vendor tailor-adapts their drivers/workloads/etc to make them look "the best"[1].

See: GPU drivers checking running process, bumping voltages and all sorts of other shenanigans.

[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/7384/state-of-cheating-in-and...
Oh so every large city that is business friendly and that is a decision?
Do they actually pay users a fair wage for their time?
Turning off location history in your account settings is also important, but turning off location services on your phone will prevent the messages from appearing (since Google will, in theory, not have your location readily available).
I can't help wonder if China is what the USSR could have been had not the hardliners come after Gorbachev, leading to turmoil and dissolution of the union.
Thanks! There are a lot of resources out there, many with recommendations from key figures in the community. I would love to hear more about how HN users are progressing up the learning curve -- how effective these tools are in practice.
It is not possible to detect and block Chrome headless
Awesome, D3D 11 support is a great milestone :)

Looking forward to version 3.11

Does it support The Sims 2 in the mean time? (all versions here are garbage related to a 256 vertices crash: https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applicatio...)
I was able to get passed the ip block on https://eos.io by using a proxy server. not sure if there are more checks after that.
Reading a patent will make you not infringe in the short term, but will you remember you got the idea from that patent in ten years?

For people who are writing novel software it can be better to always avoid reading patents, that way they can honestly state they haven't read a specific patent.
Your cell phone cannot function without actually knowing where you are (to some approximation) at all times.

That's like saying a transistor radio needs to know where broadcast antennas are, which is obviously absurd.
The rational numbers are clearly countable. The irrational numbers are uncountable, which means that for every rational number there are infinitely many irrational numbers.
Yes, the argument this article makes is the only reason we have such streets. It's a good thing this article was written 200 years ago so we can benefit from its wholly economic insights today.
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." -George Santayana

But I guess there's an element of "they did it wrong, we'll do it right" or "it'll work for us this time" or "this time is different because of x" and so on.
Travis Kalanick paid $200,000 to the driver he insulted in a viral video
There are, see Cantor's diagonal argument.
> Too much density decreases the quality of life.

Too much of anything decreases quality of life.

Everyone has their own taste, but generally speaking, if every journey out of your home has to begin and end with a parking space because you live in a pedestrian-hostile environment, that will certainly damage quality of life and the social fabric of that place as a "town".
Can't imagine living without wine. Right now I am coding while listening to music on MusicBee via wine on my linux box :-)
Sorry, not too familiar with rendering API's. Do you have a reference that you could link me to that further explains the reason for this?
because in the world we live in there are only two practical options; Android or iOS. Yes, you can do your homework and spend serious time customizing either one through the numerous amounts of gotchas to increase your privacy. At the end it boils down to "do you want Internet, email and maps that work in your phone? Good, deal with all this then!". If there was a single option that offered all of this at a reasonable price, you would see a lot of people moving to this. It is a sad frustrating state of affairs that could only be fixed with laws that would be impossible to pass with the current US lobbying system.
There's a simple fix for this problem. Give them false information.
Is it 'Expired'?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0305559/plotsummary
So where is the new cryptocurrency they promised to issue? They absolutely should switch to cryptocurrency, a highly unstable currency is much better than a currency that is stable in its hyperbolic devaluation and can actually boost the economy. Why don't they do?
The consensus valuation of Bitcoin is a whole lot shakier than the consensus valuation of the dollar.

(An interesting lesson to take from the incredible energy consumption of Bitcoin is just how much trust is worth)
I remember DX10 required an upgrade to Windows Vista at the time. Does the DX10/11 support here mean that we have a non-proprietary way of running those games? It'd be great not to have as much vendor lock-in for this kind of stuff, especially as games get older and less-supported.
To the downvoters: this is actually pretty close to the truth.
This isn't even your phone, this is your Google Account. Isn't even limited to Android.

But yes, you should think of the consequences of signing up for a service that clearly states that it records your location history.
A paying Google customer here. The fact that I'm giving them quite more than a dime doesn't make me exempt from stalking. What's your point?
Philadelphia made the list, but they also pitched three separate locations [1] within the city. It is not clear if all 3 are under consideration or if one or more of the locations has been ruled out.

[1] http://www.philly.com/philly/business/real_estate/commercial...
Ask HN: What is your coolest project in Python?
I'm disappointed that Detroit isn't on the list. My money is on Nashville or Denver. Hm... I wonder if how hard it would be to set up a decentralized blockchain pool to wager on the winner...
Check his G+: https://plus.google.com/+MattCutts

Matt Cutts has actually posted several times recently about things that irritate him about Google products. He still uses them though, of course.
The rationals have measure zero, so almost all reals are irrational. The Cantor set is an example of an uncountable set which also has measure zero.

http://austinrochford.com/posts/2013-12-31-almost-no-rationa...
I really like the theme on your blog.
Heroes 3 has been working on Wine for years, when was the last time you tried?
Your definition of peacetime/wartime does not conform to industry norms.

Peacetime in business means those times when a company has a large advantage vs. the competition in its core market, and its market is growing. In times of peace, the company can focus on expanding the market and reinforcing the company’s strengths.

In wartime, a company is fending off an imminent existential threat. Such a threat can come from a wide range of sources including competition, dramatic macro economic change, market change, supply chain change, and so forth. The great wartime CEO Andy Grove marvelously describes the forces that can take a company from peacetime to wartime in his book Only The Paranoid Survive.

https://a16z.com/2011/04/14/peacetime-ceowartime-ceo-2/
And Maps gets very annoying when I refuse to enable full location permissions for Google Play; the random prompts to enable it, hoping I would agree when not paying attention, are super sleazy. I uninstalled it last night after trialing a combination of HERE and OsmAnd. It is a lot more inconvenient but the idea of location tracking when the app in question is not in use is creepy and wasteful.
You're right, I was conflating the two issues somewhat. I do think patent terms should be be somewhat different for different classes of patents, or industries they are used in. If patents for software is to be allowed, I'm not sure why it needs to have a term of more than 3-5 years from issuance. Any industry moving at a similar clip could also benefit from reduced terms. 20 years isn't forever, but depending on industry momentum and advance rate, it ends up retarding innovation instead of helping it.

In any case, I don't think we should immediately vilify someone for using the patent system (and using it as originally intended, IMO), just because we are unhappy with the way it's been abused recently, as I think it has provided us great benefit over it's existence.