skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's not a lot of places in the country with "true" interstate integrated transit needs. Places like Chicago have far suburbs and exurbs within the commute shed in other states but are still generally within state. Even cities like St. Louis generally have a clear dominant locus in one state, which limits the ability of the other state(s) to play off the other state.

The general exceptions to this rule are Kansas City and Washington, DC, where the workplace loci are truly distributed among multiple jurisdictions so that no one state is dominant. In DC, the standard subway (WMATA) runs across all three jurisdictions, although there is some amount of political football over funding. The commuter rail systems are not integrated, but that is largely due to limited capacity over the Long Bridge. (MARC, the Maryland system, is participating in the Long Bridge replacement project in part because they do intend to extend service to Alexandria once there's capacity to do so).

NYC is a truly special case because it's simply so massive. In terms of geographical boundaries, there are roughly three natural independent sheds: trans-Hudson, trans-East, and trans-Harlem rivers. Each of these sheds is massive enough to let each of the three commuter systems that focus on their own sheds to not have to coordinate. These sheds also happen to largely coincide with different states: NJ is trans-Hudson, NY (or, rather, Long Island) is trans-East, and CT (as well as parts of NY) is trans-Harlem.
> I do like the premise of Zuckerberg's Internet.org project. I think that access to Wikipedia in particular should be a right

Until February 2018, Wikipedia had a similar zero-rating program called Wikipedia Zero [0].

> [Wikipedia] (along with Kindles) as being the path towards creating a Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy for everyone

The WikiReader [1] tried to get even closer to this -- a physical Wikipedia device. Too bad it failed commercially, it was another really nifty gadget.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Zero

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiReader
Why is getting a job not an option?
Making 7 to 10 percent after inflation is possible and it is sufficient to amass more than 1 million dollars by retirement just from changing this one habit. The point was that the average financed car is worth a massive amount in opportunity cost.
Latest Xcode needs High Sierra, not Sierra.
When you have $100B, you're one of the people structuring society.
Well, at my high school the only choices were Spanish and French. I grew up in the South. There aren't a lot of Francophiles there. I figured Spanish was a more useful language (and it turns out, I like it a lot).

I did wind up taking a semester of French in college, but I hated it.
i think sf is doing cut and cover on stockton for the new muni line and it's been in construction since i moved here 3 years ago
I have travelled to India and bought books there. Amazon India is super affordable too. Not to mention the ongoing book piracy that is rampant in countries including India.

Textbooks for higher education cost a few more than $2 each.

I agree that reading textbooks on a laptop is not ideal. But giving someone 600 books in 1 device has merit, especially when those devices are shared.

I do like the comments in this article pertaining to e-readers. I am a very late convert to Kindles, and they are usable.

In India particularly, devices like the $35 Aakash tablet are also making inroads.

It all, like you said comes down to accessibility of quality content. Digital delivery will continue to have an increased role in that.
I'm wondering if there's any evidence that classroom education in the First World has benefited from laptops.

Any peer-reviewed studies on a grade school computer-based curricula out there?
So invest it as $6,000 per year. Doesn't have to be $500 per month.
Could you write the article which explains the problem through those lenses?
All the World's Terribleness, Visualized
Indeed. All power to the soviets!
Yeah I would assume that there is no way that they would be compensated for the lost revenue. I would also imagine calculating the lost revenue for those shops, and subsequently trying to get the government to reimburse them for it, would be prohibitively expensive both politically and financially.
Yep. You can also assume 45 years if someone starts working at 20 and retires at 65.
Well, needless to say, I see it a bit differently.

Drug prohibition is not the future of humankind.

If blockchain tech can more quickly undermine it, then I don't think it's reasonable to say that it has no role in making the world a better place.

Additionally, if blockchain tech can substantially undermine a policy entrenched with corruption and enforced by violence, I think it's reasonable to surmise that it has other, less controversial use-cases as well.

The current state of development in this field suggests that I'm right - again, see the technologies above; it's not obvious how they're possible without a distributed consensus mechanism.

I also think that the remark "smoke a joint effortlessly" is both a silly ad-hominen and a red herring. I have been effortlessly smoking joints in all sorts of jurisdictions for the past decade; the change in law really didn't do much to enable that any more than it was already trivial.

However, if I were a member of a less privileged class and wanted to retain some anonymity, or if I wanted access to a more esoteric plant or compound and didn't have the social connectivity to obtain it, then I think that I'd find a mechanism to subvert these prohibitions very helpful.

Not everyone has the same opportunities and protections as you. Your implicit suggestion that everyone simply live in California is very insensitive. Technologies that tend to smooth this disparity are reasonable to celebrate.
Chicago's Regional Transit Authority operates the Metra which spreads into northern Indiana and Southern Wisconsin
> I absolutely loathe native apps (because I don't have nor want a smartphone)

Why does not having a smartphone make you loathe native apps?
I don't think I breached any agreements here, but in any case this handle is not my real name, and personal information I give through it is not all factual. :)
> Once again, everybody complained about government waste, when really the city was trying to do what it could to make it a more attractive community and encourage more businesses to reopen / stay downtown.

Having grown up in an area with no sense of style or flourish, I can appreciate the sentiment behind that. Every time I go to Japan or most of the west coast I'm blown away by how much effort goes into making the community look...nice.

However, all too often, a city's attempt to do this involves a contractor or supplier charging obscene amounts of money for the end result. Hence the accusations of waste.

Case in point: Sandy Springs, GA recently paid $99,333 for the city's new logo. The result is the caliber of work I'd expect from a Fiverr task.
Apologies for the strong tone, but how many articles do we need to actually get something done? It's exhausting to see article after article without action.
> As a plus you reduce the demand on the existing Penn tunnels used by Amtrak.

Amtrak has owned and operated the HRT (tunnels built in 1905) since 1976 when it took over the NEC from the failing Penn lines in the early 70's. It's the busiest segment of track (Interlock-A) in the world and out of the busiest train station in the world (NYP).

You could reduce demand on the existing tunnels by building ARC.
>The average working class American is financing their car. The average car payment is now an insane $500 per month. Over the average working career, that type of monthly payment represents a multi million dollar net worth at retirement.

This is completely wrong.

1. $500 is the average, averages are easily distorted by outliers. Most people who are worried about shitty jobs don't have $500 a month car payments.

2. Not spending $500 a month on a car doesn't mean you get $500 to invest. Most people need to spend > $0 on transportation.

3. $500 a month doesn't get you a multi-million dollar net worth. $500 a month at a realistic 7% gets you $1.2 million in 40 years. A more realistic $300 a month (from financing a cheaper car) gets you $700k.
How accessible is your app? Have you tried it with VoiceOver? How does it do with battery and memory vs another comparable native app? When there's an OS upgrade, does your app automatically adjust to new resolutions and device classes?
you can donate here https://www.nirsoft.net/donate.html
(i am neither user nor affiliated with the site)
> Unless you also believe thoughts and prayers will stop your mass shootings.

There are certainly enough people in the US who believe just that.
Well we could manage to make flights safe I think we can make nuclear energy safe. The biggest problem is that just -like security- safety is against profits or if non-profit cases it is bigger cost.
Transit to the airport is less helpful than you'd think. The main people who are going to want to use transit are the people who work there (being both lower income and not having to carry lots of luggage around), and the working hours of subways is generally inconvenient for airport workers.
Lab Space for YC Bio Companies
Microsoft's customer service is non-existent even for paying customers and quality is declining. The development tools are getting less reliable each release. On large projects we're seeing tens of Visual Studio crashes a day. On top of that the ecosystem is a wasteland of abandoned projects and rapid semi-schizophrenic direction changes. It's difficult building a product on a moving target.

In once case we got Scott Hanselman's attention via HN on an issue but the outcome was clearly that a major part of SCVMM's support for Linux was a hack job and mostly abandoned and their own assigned team member didn't understand the problem domain properly.

Chuck it on github for open source lip service then ignore it. Add telemetry on by default. Make it a paid service. Anything to hurt the customer's trust.

And I'm going to keep complaining loudly about this until it changes.
> While many software companies create a bloated installation package with size of 1 - 3 MB, the size of single utility in NirSoft is usually less than 100KB.

The early 2000s were a different time. While as modern day electron apps are regularly 100+ MB.
I don't know about Amazon workers but Costco workers are dang happy as far as I can see. Always jovial, joking, and teasing with each other. They seem to form good friend networks there working side by side and stuff.
> I'm not quite sure what you mean here. All of the keys on the keyboard are mapped.

Well, for some values of "mapped". There are a few buttons on the keyboard that have a defined meaning, but no corresponding software functionality, like the "Bulletin Board" key, as well as the progressive dots that you mentioned.

I think the OLPC software we were using might have been an early version, and hadn't yet started using some of the keys next to the display.

> The idea behind an OS that journals everything you do with it is great.

Sure. But using that as the primary system for data storage was questionable. When I used it, at least, there was very little support for naming and organizing saved activities, or for managing storage. This seems like it'd be a pretty serious obstacle to any sort of serious educational use.

> Do you have links to any discussion on this?

Not offhand. This was ~10 years ago! I think it was on the OLPC wiki somewhere, but it might have been deleted. Or my memory might be faulty. :)

What's probably true in general, though, was that the OLPC/Sugar development team prioritized the development of activities that they thought would be cool or useful, rather than projects which were actually in demand by educators in the target countries.
When I was in high school in the 70s I got to attend a week of programming classes at U Waterloo. I had never programmed before. My first programming language was APL. We sat for hours in front of IBM typewriters with strange symbols, trying to write simple programs. The noise from a roomfull of typewriters still rang in my ears at night.

I didn't learn much, sadly, but it sure piqued my interest in programming.

APL is a great language, but it shouldn't be the first one you meet.
From memory:

JFK: just have to transfer from AirTrain to regular subway in Jamaica (?) Queens.

Newark: take the bus to Newark station and take PATH train to lower Manhattan.

Plus you get to see real New Jersians and New Yorkers. They are not overly friendly and they dress way too fancy compared to the Californians.
What's interesting is if you look at percentage household spending, food and healthcare are really the only recurring ones that are not trending downward:

- housing - trending downward when not attempting to live in dense urban area (i.e. prefab modular homes)

- energy - trending downward once renewables and battery technology catch up

- transportation - trending downward when looking at non-luxury cars as well as on demand (Uber, etc.) and electric cars powered by renewables

- childcare/education - trending downward when combined with homeschooling and MOOCs like Coursera, Udacity)

- clothes - trending downward when you focus on store brands

- entertainment - trending downward (Youtube)

What happens if you could build an automated machine that you owned that farmed for you in your backyard and its cost trended downward?

Then really the only cost that needs to be managed is healthcare.
Sure, agencies are created whenever multiple states need to share two sides of a public transit solution (or bridges, tunnels, etc.). e.g., Port Authority of NY & NJ, PATH, Delaware River Port Authority (PA & NJ), etc.. they are found virtually everywhere where cities exist near borders.
Dude you are reading that comment a bit to literally. Internet can easily supply one with information equivalent to hundreds or thousands of books. Paper can obviously not match that.
sounds like how politicians act, exploit anger to get what you want all the while convincing others its good for them.

however with all the talk about privacy it never ceases to amaze me how fast people will give it up if they get what they want or worse, if something bad or inconveniencing happens to people they don't like. what does that say about society when people will give up something just to punish or deprive others.
>After he outlined a dramatic (and ultimately metaphorical) plan to drop tablets out of helicopters...

"I thought it would work! I planned those thing right down to the last detail. It was perfect! Where'd you get those tablets???"

"As God as my witness, I though tablets could fly."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lf3mgmEdfwg
"I see no reason that humanity is worth saving over some other, better form of life. I'm not saying its ethical to mow down innocents to make way for the next generation, but some humans are pretty fucking awful. If our descendants are robots with the intelligence of Hawking and are full of kindness and grace then why should we insist that humanity exist forever?"

If any beings exterminated humanity or through inaction allowed it to go extinct, I'd seriously question their kindness.

Truly kind beings would bring humanity along and help us to be less destructive.
man, I hate being that guy, but no https?

Super interested in this podcast though
AMD Ryzen 3 2200G review: The Vega CPU with 1080p gaming chops
I didn't mean to imply doubling forever. Also, yes I assumed that the robot would have to be employed at least initially to earn a wage, so that it could buy materials and components off alibaba.
Android Things Release Candidate
Why every organization needs a human-centered design hallway
You could train the network to convert pixel-images into vector graphics; this is a useful operation. As training data you could generate random SVG shapes, and the associated rasterized images.
> would it even work on an MMO?

CheatEngine is a great first step in developing any bot, for any game.

GW2 doesn't have to trust the client for CE to be useful, it's just that the usefulness is different than what you're using it for currently. The goal of CE in developing an MMO bot is to figure out where in memory things like player location, party members, linked list of all nearby objects, etc, are. This allows the user to write the bot in a way that's pulling information directly from memory. CE is a great way to back into this data (coupled with a debugger/disassemble, of course).
Sure but I think you example shows that even a gui that produces the nicest possible text file for an exported macro is going to leave one with two activities; using the gui to accomplish the task and editing the output macro to create a batch for a repeated activity.

The command line allows these two activities to be closer to one activity and so when you base your skill set on using the command line, you get both things and get easy switch between them. It seem clear that for the automating of little tasks, this is kind of necessary.
Is this really close to Boulder? What about contamination of water?
What you can Learn from Wayfair – the online furniture retailer generating $5B
"hydrogen fluoride".

That's insane.
This article touches on but doesn't explore in great detail the history of elevated lines in NYC. Some of their traces have been incorporated into the current system, most notably as the 7 train in Queens and the J/M/Z (including the Ridgewood/Middle Village spur), but many were torn down.

Some lines in Brooklyn that people aren't even aware of (beyond the 2nd and 3rd Ave lines):

* The Myrtle Ave elevated, running from Downtown Brooklyn down Myrtle and connecting with the M's Ridgewood spur. Torn down in the 1960s.

* The Lexington Ave elevated, running from the Brooklyn Bridge waterfront across Downtown Brooklyn and Bed Stuy, connecting to the current J/Z line near Broadway Junction. Torn down in the 1950s.

* The Fulton St elevated, since replaced by the A train, that ran over Fulton St all the way into Downtown Brooklyn. Torn down in the 1940s.

You can see these elevated lines crossing Northern Brooklyn in this map from 1949: https://www.nycsubway.org/perl/caption.pl?/img/maps/system_1...

I personally would have found these lines quite useful, but what took their place was a collection of bus routes, running along old streetcar routes (read: weird routes that stop suddenly at borough and neighborhood boundaries). And NYC buses cannot be trusted...
As a user, I appreciate web apps because:

1. Web apps typically work everywhere, including on my Android phone, on my Windows machine, on my mom's Mac, and on Linux when I used to use it as my primary desktop platform. I know this without having to look up a compatibility table because I opened it in my browser, and other than mobile-version/desktop-version, web apps work the same way everywhere. Native apps are often platform exclusives, and even if they do work on multiple platforms, they work differently on different ones. Try asking someone who owns a Mac how to use MS Office when you're on Windows.

2. I know how to share web apps with my mom by texting her a link. Even if your native app has a share button, it's in a different place in different apps instead of just "click the address bar and hit Ctrl-C".

3. Web apps almost always work with my browser's password manager, ad blocker, and stuff. Native apps are more of a crapshoot there.

4. Web apps are limited by the browser's sandbox (this is not applicable to native apps on Android or iOS, since they're sandboxed pretty much the same way as web apps, but Windows and Mac are both still playing catch-up).

5. If Linux users didn't have web apps, they'd have no apps at all.
Exactly what I meant. And this results in wiping out your unvested stock.
Or this: https://www.kodak.com/US/en/kodakone/default.htm
Ask HN: Developer's Block. Please Advice
I am facing something that every developer does on a number of occassions in their careers i.e. a challenging and an insurmountable problem to solve , build and deliver a complex feature with near infinite user scenarios and edge cases. This is not the very first time in my 5 years plus career that I am facing this situation. However , this time and probably the very first time I feel paralyzed and almost defeated by this feature that am trying to build since almost a week (including the weekend). Every solution I build fails to achieve one or more core scenarios or unit tests. I am almost at the end of my estimated schedule without a stable feature that I am to deliver and demo this week to end users. I am extremely passionate about the software development craft (with a big thanks to the HN community for that!). I love solving such problems and have done so from the very moment I took my first software dev role right out of college. I really don't know why am feeling unusually stressed out due to this one seemingly unconquerable feature. Inspite of having put in extra hours at work I see no perfect solution on the horizon . What makes me even more disappointed in myself is that as a senior developer I am unable to solve this , and I aspire to work in companies like Microsoft , Amazon etc. Seeking advice from this wonderful community. How do I deal with this and what are some steps I could follow to get through this without losing my mind? What can I so prevent myself from having a nervous breakdown like this in future? How did you deal with such situations in your career and get out of it still standing tall? Thanks!
If you'd like to read more about this, I recommend John Wesley Powell's biography: "Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West" https://amzn.to/2H2v7oZ
> It's what leads to proliferation of ads, surveillance and growth strategies like dumbing down software to the point of almost complete uselessness

How did SaaS lead to all these things? Unless you're broadning the definition of SaaS from a revenue model and software deployment strategy to somethibg like "any software that you use that runs on remote servers". But that's the whole point of connecting computers together in a network!
> insiders who know about the current state of the transit organizations consider this suggestion so absurd as to write an April Fools post

The difficulty comes down to regional politics. The regional rail systems (LIRR, Metro-North and NJTR) were set up to give those on Long Island, upstate/in Connecticut and in New Jersey, respectively, a dedicated regional transit authority. A politician attempting to unify operations would need to convince those voters should risk giving up their regional transit control.
Is the Kindle profitable on its own? I thought it was sold at cost or at a loss with the expectation it would lead to more profitable ebook sales.
I don’t think a hypothetical move to ARM will change much for web development. Most of our tools are in interpreted languages (as well as the languages we develop in - JavaScript, Python, Ruby, etc) and interpreters are available for ARM already.

I would be more concerned for designers and creatives who need software like Sketch, Photoshop, After Effects, etc.
>You give informed consent by continuing to play.

The average player, even if they consent, is in no way informed enough to understand what having such a system installed means. They don't understand the value of the information they are leaking, and thus they are not in a position to give informed consent.

Many of those installing this kind of software are literal children, and thus quite incapable of giving informed consent.
sorry! we're still working out the logistics of running the podcast but we'll switch the site over to https as soon as possible
AT&T and cable lobby are terrified of a California net neutrality bill