skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It would have only been ~100 years after Spartacus and his merry band were crucified along the road to Rome after the Third Servile War. Even if that was the only notorious crucifixion (and it was not), I think would be highly memorable around a century later.
I would prefer to live in the US than any of these countries funding HSR. Electric cars and electric scooters are enough to get around the city and around the state, with flights for anything much longer than that. Autonomous vehicles available via subscription will make that even better.
When driving your car inter-city do you never think ‘if only I could be working, relaxing or sleeping with this time’ like in a train?
Everyone will be sued. That much is certain. However, executing machine learning in the browser to protect privacy is a step forward.
Im still wondering why Quora is allowed in google results. They're like the new expertsexchange. Plus it completely baffles me that anyone would use it for a topic that has a stack exchange.
It has to be a joke.
Tensorflow privacy: Library for training machine learning models with privacy
And, in general, where the government of China says a rail link goes is where it goes, with minimal planning and outside input from citizens and residents. In the U.S. and other Western-style governments, that's simply a non-starter.
A bit of quick feedback (I don't have time to read the whole thing right now -- sorry about that).

- You have UAT (User Acceptance Testing) in the phase after integration. This seems to be done to meet the philosophical desire to link it with "Meets Reality". However, I have found that moving acceptance testing higher in the process is very beneficial. While the sign off that the software is accepted is after integration, the activity for preparing the tests ideally starts just slightly after the start of specification. Do you have any ideas for staggering the some of these activities?

As an example, I once was handed a QA group for my XP team. At first I wasn't sure what to do with it. But then I got the idea to have a QA member write acceptance tests at the same time that the developers were writing the unit tests and code. The developers were not allowed to finish their story until the acceptance tests passed (which in this project was mostly manual acceptance tests). Then after integration (at the end of our sprint), the QA team ran all of the acceptance tests again to ensure that integration was successful. Frequently XP teams also write automated acceptance tests at the same time that they do unit tests and coding.

- There is a statement that Kent Beck advocates "Do the simplest thing that could possibly work", but this is only half a quote and the missing half is actually crucial. "Do the simplest thing that could possibly work and then refactor". "Simplest thing" without refactoring leads to incredibly fast degradation in design. In XP, design is just as important as it is in other methodologies, it's just that you distribute the activity across the development phase instead of having a dedicated phase. It is incredibly important to understand (and often forgotten) that you must be refactoring all the time. You are not finished your story until you are happy with the overall design (and not just your bit of it). Again, without this activity, your code will very quickly degrade -- especially if you are pushing to do things "the simplest way".

I didn't read much past that point, so I'm probably missing it, but what design activities do you see in this methodology and how does it integrate with the development phases you've laid out?
What the article is saying is that the rich had their taxes reduced by a far larger proportion of their income than did everyone else. Which was exactly what Trump and the Republicans were intending.

And they said this would be great for the whole country because it would lead to huge capital investments that would in turn lead to economic benefits for everyone. But that simply hasn't happened.
Since cars have a 10-20 year lifespan, and electric is becoming superior, that will probably solve itself over the next 10-20 years (maybe they'll be EV powered by natural gas for a while, but that's still a win, and then the grid might get greener.)

Aviation fuel is the highest and best use of hydrocarbons (along with some chemical production), so we can deal with that last, after lots of power generation, demand reduction/efficiency, etc
It's ok for a submitter to use a subtitle when it's closer to HN's criteria of not being misleading or baity. In this case the subtitle doesn't exactly hit the mark, but the title's pretty baity.
I'll just put this here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18368455

This is normal. Poor sw practices lead to bugs, which lead to invalid science.

Also

https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.1.2018082...

This got caught because it led to a big fight. Most other scientific software is not audited at all. Given my experience with those who write them, I tend not to trust most conjugational results coming from science.
Not really because it takes me a fraction of the time. I can do those things far more comfortably when I get there.
No other profession has quite the same capacity to transform itself.

Like blacksmiths, programmers are capable of building tools that not only change the way they work but enable new kinds of work to be done, often by making previously onerous tasks trivial, and giving the individual a much large potential impact.

Unlike blacksmiths, programmers can share their inventions with the entire industry in the blink of an eye. So the rate at which the programmer's toolchain can change is indeed special.

Sure, it can also be glorified plumbing at times, but I think we think programming is special because it is.(Not that that will continue to be the case forever.)
Self driving will solve that; self driving is absolutely there already technically if we restricted it to special lanes/highways/etc, and probably could be 100% of interstates already too.

There are some city center to nearby city center where rail would be nice, I agree.

Most of the time when I'm going intercity it is by plane.
Sign me up for another vote in favor of a train ride... healthier and more comfortable, I can work, and I don’t have to deal with the TSA? Oh please god yes.
Add 2-3 hours for airport time wasted on both ends. But regardless of the time, I would much rather take a 10 hour train ride in comfortable, roomy seats, with all my luggage within reach, than crammed for five hours into an airplane seat literally as small as it can possibly be and that I can't get out of for half the time, especially if it's cheaper, which it probably would be.
GPS+GLONASS chips have been available for a while now. Here’s an article about some new chips which support 4 constellations: https://www.gpsworld.com/quad-constellation-receiver-gps-glo...
You can definitely have ads like Reddit or StackOverflow that work fine though. Messing with the content itself is the problem.
I don't think that this is necessarily true. In Europe we have night trains running between countries which of course also take 8 or 10 hours or more and they are more or less profitable.

However an average speed of 200 miles (320 km) per hour is still a lot. Especially because you will have stops in between which of course means that the v_max must be even higher.
Celebrating 21 years online ─ whitehouse.com
That actually makes cronix' point.
Why do you even allow donations to "non-verified" websites at all? As far as I can tell, there really isn't any legitimate reason for this, other than forcing website owners to sign up for your payment system.
Funny thing is a lot of those ads aren't even paid for, wannabe influencers post ads now to make themselves look like they are being paid to post ads, to eventually get paid to post ads.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/12/influ...
A non-new, efficient car (say, a 3 year old Prius) is about $0.15/mi to operate.
Sometimes, it seems, the best outcome would be to let the fringes secede into their "dystopia" small states and allow them to re-create their hells on earth. The escapees could vaccinate society for another generation.

There are those who say this is precisely what is happening with California.
Due to how they were written, a lot of compilers don't really care about character encoding in the sense that any bytes >127 were simply considered identifier characters because their tokenisers picked out the special characters and "anything else" would be classified with the usual identifier range. This meant you could use whatever single or multibyte encodings you wanted, as long as any trailing bytes of a single character didn't conflict with the special characters; with this, UTF-8 naturally works too.
Maybe US should rethink a little bit why it takes until 2029 to build a railway in between SF and LA, maybe the due diligence is exaggerated and wear the whole process down?
I don't think anyone is seriously considering a cross Canada high speed train connection. The emphasis has always been, as it is in many other regions, on short hops lasting up to 3-4 hours over highly trafficked routes. Portions of the Quebec City to Windsor corridor are ideal candidates for high-speed connections.
> The story centres entirely on Kjellberg accidentally throwing a fringe site into a laundry list of other outlets he was seeking to signal-boost.

Poor Pewd! It's sad how these accidents keep happening to him, over and over again. Just bad luck, I guess.
Are there any groups pushing their agenda with strong information campaigns as opposed to resorting to coercion?

Yes. In addition to libertarians, there are also center-left classical liberals and scientists who are concerned about politically motivated science denial.
> Epic has nearly every person in the US's medical history in their databases (since their usage is so widespread) so if you sign up to use Epic you get the medical history with it

Why is this legal?
> London-Manchester is 210 miles, and trains take only 2 hours

Yes and to further emphasise, this is not a high speed train (though it does use leaning trains making it faster than other lines, and has few stops. Also it's 2 hours 15 mins to be precise).

The proposed high speed train promises London-Manchester in ~1 hour.
Eh. Most major centers of power have large computing resources changing how they do things. Wal-Mart, for instance, as a basically non-tech company, leveraged computers for stocking and supply chains and became a culture-chaging retail giant. Computers have made their way into cars, and even toasters. We have high frequency trading (done by computers) majorly affecting markets. I could probably go on like this for a while. Eating the world, check.

As for not hard--I don't know. We have an unusually high paying career, which companies do not do out of the generosity of their hearts. They have a limited supply of people that can do it. Quite a few people show no aptitude at all. At the high end, it merges into pure computer science, with an essentially unlimited amount to know. So, you can draw badly, or become a professional artist. Certainly, a person can program badly, but I don't think you can call it "not hard" any more than you can call anything else "not hard".

I wouldn't, and don't, romanticize it. It often just sucks. And programmers can often come with pointless, inflated egos from some view that they do something special, and I would like to see a check on that and those pointless egos deflated. But "not eating the world" and "not hard" don't really check out, from my perspective.
Intercity travel in Canada is pretty dismal. I just took the train from Vancouver to Winnipeg for the first time, and from Fresno to Vancouver. Both were great experiences, with the Canada line being more social and more interesting, but with old trains and low priority on the tracks. Amtrak was fine, but like VIA took 30+ hours. Anyone taking the train is doing so because they prefer the experience. Typically the fares are not competitive with airline costs but it's a much more relaxing experience. Amtrak was far more affordable, and both trains allow more baggage if you have it.
This looks like something a library author would write while implementing a range and not something that end users would write while using ranges. Could you point to an implementation in a different language that offers a similar abstraction in a more succinct manner (While offering the same type safety and low runtime overhead).
How hard is it to simply keep one's code up to date? I'm pretty sure there weren't any radically different paradigms introduced in Python 3.

Somehow the world of JavaScript has been able to quickly adapt to a rapidly changing language and the community is hardly fractured along the lines of language. Adopting new language features and browser APIs is just a matter of fact. What's different about Python?
The article talks about a train that can go 200mph. That makes having people drive between cities seem a rather slow option. Plus you can get work done on a train. On a car it is not possible as a driver (other than phone calls) and pretty hard as a passenger.

I take your point about planes, but it's good to have more than one option and trains are good for middling distances, as there isn't all the need to check in, and they can start and stop closer to where you want to depart from and arrive.

Not to mention global warming :-)
Missed that tidbit. Thanks for pointing to it.
This article starts with confusing time-restricted feeding with intermittent fasting and only gets worse from there.
My commute is under 15 minutes each way and this is the only thing I think about during that time. I hate every minute of attention sucking driving.
If you think you see general solution for "self driving" in next 20 years, i have a bridge to sell you
I think Copyleft is very well suited for academic research, and for research produced by government institutions.
>Yes, we've covered that haven't we? In the very post you just replied to, in order to add absolutely nothing to the discussion?

I’m pointing out that it’s a massive caveat. It’s like claiming they built a plane and other than it not being able to fly, it’s just as good as the ones we have. A society without modern medicine is significantly worse off.

>That would be any kind of environment

No, you should learn about the industrial scale farming that feeds most of the planet

>They barely have a concept of work

Oh? What happens when nobody wants to hunt then? Work is what members of a society do to keep it going. If they aren’t smart enough to recognize it, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

>Tilling a field with a hoe is a completely unnecessary...

Let me stop you there. Hunter gatherer approaches do not scale. Growing food is entirely necessary to prevent 50 and 100 year storms/droughts from causing mass suffering and starvation.

It’s not cultural bias. It’s foresight to plan for the future and actually feed everyone rather than killing babies and old people during hard times.
Title is very misleading and completely obscures the point of the article
The problem is that flights are not sustainable much longer. Flying uses an astounding amount of subsidized fossil fuels, requires infrastructure that takes up quite a large amount of space, and is increasingly both inconvenient and intrusive. They're also a separate matter from the last-mile problem that bicycles, scooters, and autonomous vehicles aim to solve (assuming we can structure AV use in a way that, during the transition period towards full subscription use, doesn't increase traffic like so-called ridesharing taxis do now).

The United States can be one of these countries funding HSR. Countries that are quite pleasant to live in--and some that aren't, depending on your outlook--are already funding HSR and already have expansive rail networks. There's no reason we can't, too.
I wonder what motivates Adam D’Angelo to keep on as founder and CEO after 10 years of running Quora. Here is someone who got rich off FB and could do anything. Maybe early on that “anything” was Quora but I really can’t believe that what Quora is now is anything close to what he envisioned when he first started the site. At this point it feels like a Zombie co that keeps chugging along because it has no other choice but to do so?

Quora embodies what I fear most about the idea of ever starting a VC-backed co...that once you accept money it is very hard to return it and if your burn rate is low you could just “exist” for years without actually succeeding or accomplishing much at all.
And it "kinda" works in the same way the simplified Bernoulli explanation of the wing works.
So, look, don't do this.

This isn't about whether and to what degree "companies" are cartoonishly evil. And when you divert the conversation into that very well worn path, you distract from other problems.

There are lots of threads on HN where complaints about corporate ethics are on topic.
We (the USA) have an economy based around taxing the 99% and cutting societal benefits, not limited to just infrastructure. Wall Street doesn't see profits to be made by funding large public sector interstate projects, and they (along with corporate monopolies in tech and pharma, big oil, insurance and real estate) choose our policy and forego anything that would help stimulate production outside of debt collection/rent collection/patent trolling and stock inflation via buy backs.

The fact is these sectors don't want to stimulate economic growth, they want to suppress wages, suppress the growth of future competitors and continue collecting massive amounts of unearned income via debt/rents/patent trolling/etc...
I would like to preemptively suggest that the author is focusing on dense areas of the country. He is suggesting high speed rail between Portland-Seattle, Dallas-Houston, NYC-DC, etc. Not Los Angeles-Chicago or DC-Seattle.
I tried to figure out how to edit this wiki page and submit a PR but ran out of time for today, so let me just drop this suggestion here for now.

I would change this:

> A recontextualization of the software process as being an exercise in mitigating different kinds of risk.

to:

> A new way to look at the software development process: it's an exercise in mitigating different kinds of risk.

The PR comment would be "Use plain English." ;-)
It was shown that a system won’t even rum with 640K, so this (disputed) quote became an example of shortsightedness in tech. However, a system does not need to meet the maximum detectable frame rate of the human eye to be usable, or even close to it. There is a difference in use, yes, but a mere luxury. That’s why I think this comparison doesn’t hold.
Airlines’ Boarding Changes Reward Higher-Paying Travelers
Seems like Canada could realistically cover almost 75% of the population: https://i.redd.it/sjbijiqb0u211.png
USA uses fleets of 737s and A320s. The mean distances are right.
The skill of relaxing and enjoying time off.
In addition to this, they've also locked the ability for users to vote for this feature so even if you do sign in, you can't vote for end to end encryption to be implemented.
For inter-city travel high speed trains will outpace any car even under ideal traffic conditions.

Paris - Stuttgart
Car: >6h;
TGV: ~3h
Strangely, living in the U.S. for many years doesn't qualify you as a credible source, just as someone who's collected a bunch of anecdotes.
Their response to the request for end to end encryption was a non-response. They've stated that they believe in security but it doesn't get any more substantive than that.
You've done zero research about this, then.

A Canadian company owned uranium reserves and wanted to sell the ownership of them to Rosatom. Not the physical resources, which cannot leave the country, just the ownership.

This still requires government oversight, so 8 different agencies had to sign off on it. All agencies did, including the state department. Hillary was not involved in the decision to approve the sale, apart from in charge of one of the many departments overseeing it.
Oh it is nothing new that HN is bashing code in science. But if anything that story is a reason for each group to build their own independent code instead of trying to enforce so much software engineering overhead until there is only one code by the best funded group is left because nobody else dares to (or can afford to) build their own code.
+1

> Error establishing a database connection
If you enjoyed that article, you might appreciate an episode of Forensic Files titled "All That Glitters is Gold" where an crime was solved by forensic analysis of glitter.

Apparently, glitter is not as generic as one might think! And, there are glitter collectors.
I would guess at least 3 or 4 orders of magnitude.
One of PewDiePie recent videos highlights this issue. He had one of his videos copystriked in which he used a fair use segment from another video. And in that segment was a song playing in the background. So, that's like three levels deep of systematic abuse.

Apparently, you can also get in trouble by humming or singing (for a few seconds) copyrighted songs. That's just plain stupid.

It's kind of funny though, seeing a song copyright holder getting hit by a 3rd-party strike. Goes to show what kind of a mess YouTube is turning into.

And it for sure does not help that YouTube's motto is 'screw creators. we are always right.'.
I wonder what the protocol is for 'borrowing' Ivanpah to point it at the moon at night and at what point in the exchange the phrase, 'well, you won't be using it', will finally occur.

edit - And by whom. Should probably get it in early, just in case.
>Tillage was done as little as necessary

But it was done FFS. You know you could get a lot more out of a discussion if you didn’t start out with easily disprovable hostile statements.
A man lost his job to a rape joke. Are you cheering?
the fact he is the most followed person on YouTube ..... tell us a lot who a mass stermination was planned by who runs this planet
Isn't it interesting to think about though? If you could built a coast to coast—or even half way—high speed transit option that isn't a bus or car, what would it look like? If you could use existing infrastructure with perhaps minor changes, what could you build or think of? It's really a domain that presents insane constraints to work in/on. Infrastructure currently costs tremendous amounts to build and maintain, the distance is extremely vast, the terrain is rugged, the climate varies wildly, the population is low and spread out. What sort of impact could it have on future urban development?
Each of those specks of dust modeled as a tiny mirror would be very much subject to diffraction limits. This would basically make what you propose equivalent to an approximate black body that's like asphalt with 12% albedo.

Dandy.
One thing that has happened is that Quora is now dominated by users from India. That has resulted in much content that is not as relevant to audiences in the US. One would think that an answer is an answer but it turns out it’s not like that, there is a cultural element and something that works in one country doesn’t work in all others.
Why do you pick San Francisco to Atlanta of all pairs of cities? How about Atlanta and Charlotte? Atlanta and Nashville? Dallas and Oklahoma City? Dallas and Houston? Dallas and Memphis? Memphis and Nashville? Nashville and Louisville? Louisville and Cincinnati? Cincinnati and Cleveland? Cleveland and Chicago? Chicago and St Louis? Chicago and Milwaukee? St Louis and Kansas City? Boston and New York? New York and DC? DC and Philadelphia? Philadelphia and Pittsburgh? Pittsburgh and Cleveland? These pairs are all in the sweet spot of where high speed rail makes an incredible amount of sense. And lots of the people driving or flying between them regularly would much rather take a comfortable train.
Heh. Not saying Allegro was right, but it's worth noting that his critics were not just scholars of religion, but religious. He insulted their deity. As is usually the case with religious scholarship, the academics aren't exactly unbiased.