skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "Abandoning high-speed rail entirely means we will have wasted billions of dollars with nothing but broken promises and lawsuits to show for it,” he said."

Sounds like sunk-cost fallacy.

> "And by the way, I am not interested in sending $3.5 billion in federal funding that was allocated to this project back to Donald Trump.”

Sounds like a misleading personal appeal to CA residents that dislike Trump.

Why would we settle for a high speed line ONLY between Merced and Bakersfield? Merced is a dinky little town of 80k and is several hours out from SF and San Jose via public transport and via car. Who is going to use this high-speed rail?

Traveling SF to LA using this new line would mean:
1. Either driving 2.5 hours to Merced or taking a 3 hour, $30 Amtrak
2. Getting on the high-speed train (ticket price tbd)
3. Taking a 3 hour, $45 Amtrak from Bakersfield to LA

So using this new line I can take 6 hours + (high speed rail time hours), two transfers, and cost $75 + (high speed rail ticket cost).

Or I could take a $30 dollar greyhound in eight hours
Try Out Spark/Alluxio/S3 on AWS for Free Using Sandbox
47 != 27... this article is glorifying spinsterhood.
In this hypothetical I'm not saying that you wouldn't have the right to hack your BMW to let it drive on any road, if you are able to. But BMW aren't obliged to make it drive every road by default, nor are they obliged to make it easy to hack.

And lest you think this is an absurd example, we're already heading down this exact path with drones, of which many now default to being geo-fenced from flying in restricted zones. It won't be long before these restrictions become nominally impossible for laypeople to switch off without some kind of security key.
Ok... Go on then. Please expand on how providing for people unwilling to work is defensible. I'm open minded, convince me.

We do that now. It's called "prison." The question is, could we spend a similar amount of money in other ways and get a better society in the bargain?

It's analogous to how our private healthcare system costs us more money for worse results than other countries' "socialized" systems do. It's usually a bad idea to let politics and ideology take precedence over objective metrics.
Feel free to do what works for you. I probably would, but I can't imagine most anyone rolling out cat5. Heck, my parent's place was installed with cat5 to each room, but I doubt I'd have them bother with it to install multi-point wifi.

The first thing people seem to go for are wifi repeaters, which seem to be terrible overall. I tried to setup/troubleshoot one at a friend's house and it sucked. When it did work, there was significantly more latency and the throughput seemed lower.

I've heard pretty good things about the power line devices and have suggested them in certain circumstances, they just don't seem to have caught on widely.

Mesh networks use a proprietary second network to address the problems with wifi repeaters. It sucks they're all proprietary, but from what I've heard most seem to work fairly well. I wish there were more with open standards and I'm not a fan of sign-ins.

Honestly, for most people upgrading their router to something relatively modern often extends the speed and range enough that other routers aren't needed.
How can they learn anything when there is no one looking at their code !? It would probably be easy to cheat too.
Samsung's Android browser hits 1B downloads, more than Firefox and Opera
Hahahaha they're all cancelled or expired cards :)
I think the key word there is "a rail line." Much of the LA to San Diego route is currently single-tracked -- trains traveling in both directions share a single physical track and have to be scheduled so that only one train occupies the track at a time. If your train falls even a few minutes behind schedule (and this seems to happen a lot), it starts missing its slots and ends up spending time stopped on sidings waiting for trains going the opposite direction to clear the track. Now your 3-hour trip turns into a 5 or 6 hour trip.

But yeah, if you wanted to start building high-quality inter-city rail in California, LA/San Diego seems like an obvious place to start. They're the 2nd and 8th largest cities in the US and only 120 miles apart. You wouldn't even need "high-speed" rail to make it work. A train that reliably averaged, say, 80 mph could make the trip in 90 minutes, which is a lot faster than driving most of the time.

On the other hand, I guess "reliable rail that's not terribly slow" doesn't get people excited like "high-speed rail" does.
Not just faster than cars; faster than cars under ideal circumstances for cars.
Where is the money already collected via taxes going to?
Lincoln and Darwin Shaped the Modern World
Wow, you're just wrong on the basic facts. Good luck with your life.
Some states require dealers licenses to participate in auctions. But if you know a guy with a license, you can score amazing deals (which are only amazing because of the limited pool of bidders).

I think knowing how to fix cars is valuable, but I don't think doing maintenance yourself generally pays off. I'm pretty handy with a car, but the only maintenance I do myself are brakes and batteries. Tires require special tools, so those are out for the shade-tree, same with suspension (which requires alignments after installation). I've found that oil changes, air filters, wiper blades can be done at the dealer for about the cost of parts (at least for my Ford and Toyota).

Now, as far as fixing repairs. Most mechanics, especially at dealerships, will toss parts at the problem. So knowing how to research the problem can help save you a boat load of money, even if you do none of the physical work yourself, since you can come in and ask for them to perform some specific fix. Additionally, lots of sensors are easy fixes if you can follow direction on YouTube/forums.
Skype contact lists may have been exposed (2017)
Show HN: We've spent the last year building a bank – Ask us Anything
Well that's 7 minutes of my life I won't get back.
Acesleep+Mattress+Review+It+Is+Super+Cool
That is a valid defense.

But he had plenty of opportunities of doing something about it.
Choo-choo or no choo-choo, bankruptcy is coming. Just look at the amount of unfunded pension liabilities.

Then look at the Governor and Legislature, can anyone even imagine that crew solving any real problems?
Were you like alive during the rolling blackouts era?
Would you mind explaining why compiling to machine code was faster than to C?
Right now critics will label it the ghost train to nowhere. At least if it connected to San Jose it would prove somewhat useful.

Perhaps its better to never buy the rolling stock or hire staff? Otherwise there will be stories in the press about trains running where the staff outnumbers the passengers?
You should strive for a deal that allows you to go independent after a few years. They want to keep you dependent on them of course. I wonder if the practice of law-firms should work for IT, at some point you get an offer for partnership. Otherwise even if you work for Google and all your income is spent on living, including family, then what safety is there for future. You should be working for somebody else in order that at some point you no longer have to work for somebody else.
A thing I always didn't like of Bootstrap is that it requires you to load a full version of jQuery just to use it. Maybe I don't need the whole jQuery, because I use another framework, or because I have a very simple site that doesn't require any JavaScript at all.

The thing is that when Bootstrap first launched everyone was using jQuery, so it was a de facto standard, everyone already had it, so requiring it as a dependency was not an issue at all, now we are moving towards different web technologies and practically nobody is using jQuery, and having to load it just a dependency to Bootstrap is not good, considering that it will slow down the loading of the page and consume traffic for mobile users.
I was looking at the milligram site and it looked oddly familiar. Seems http://getskeleton.com/ uses the same layout for their main page demoing the framework.
"Some cars are installed with devices that prevent the car from turning on if someone misses a payment and it has become easier to geo-locate a car to tow it away."

Well that's terrifying. Even more of a reason to buy used, older cars with less mileage.
We all have to work on critical thinking.
Really? Is medium now blocking the content published by users? How do writers put up with that?
that's what happens when publicly elected lawyers and actors draw up complex infrastructure projects. something completely idiotic and infeasible must have been done in during the planning process.
As a Californian for 56 years, I realized something was seriously wrong about 10 years ago. I moved to another state last year.
Ask HN: Good customer support AI system?
Has anyone found a good customer support system that you can train to auto-tag support requests?
What kind of viral marketing campaign is this for?
Please don't forget cobalt and lithium mining. Plus processing into batteries. They have pretty bad environmental impacts as well.
While I am, generally speaking, appalled, I could imagine scenarios in which the ex was, let's say, violently abusive, and it might be justified. "We're not here to judge, we're here to Photoshop", is an awesome slogan. Also, awful.
Ask HN: Can you retire early on $1m?
I see a lot of blogs from people who retire in their 30s with a net worth of $1m. I assume they are living in cheaper states than CA or NY, but is that really enough to live on for the rest of your life if you never take a salary ever again?
There’s very little evidence for a broken leg being caused by the lack of plaster around it, yet nobody questions its efficacy...
Employment rate is such a perverse metric.

Our metric must take into account the quality of employment as well.
This perception of bias stems from a technical illiteracy of search autocomplete. Even your example is a removed autocomplete result because of sexual content [1].

Google recently re-explained how their autocomplete policy works [2] because partisan hacks were cherry-picking queries to accuse Google of bias [3], not unlike GP is doing here.

[1] https://www.blog.google/products/search/how-google-autocompl...

[2] https://blog.google/products/search/google-search-autocomple...

[3] https://medium.com/@rhea/hillary-clintons-search-results-man...
> If you believe the ai hype, soon bicycles will be killing far more people than cars

Citation, please.
How hard is it to just build it (SF to LA) over the water? Serious question here?
Yes, we've been "terraforming" it. But not in a way that's good for us, I think. Not to mention all the other species that have evolved for pre-human conditions. And have increasingly experiencing conditions for which they're not well adapted. Worse, conditions that have been changing far too fast for evolutionary adaptation. Or even mass migration. So they're getting screwed. What we're now calling the Anthropocene Extinction Event.

So perhaps "terraforming" isn't the appropriate term. Maybe more like "un-terraforming". If CO2 goes runaway enough, we might even wipe out enough photosynthetic capacity (especially in the oceans) to undo the Great Oxygenation Event. And make the planet safe for anaerobes again.
> The reason a business returns money is it doesn’t know how to successfully reinvest the money

Most companies that do not return money through dividends or stock buy backs are eventually pressured to do so by activist investors / hedge funds, even Apple. The only company which has managed to resist this is Amazon which is famous for cross-financing to enter a market and then totally dominate it with the funds from profitable parts of the company (e.g. AWS). It only works because Amazon stockholders in general know that this is the secret sauce behind Amazon's entire business model.
The IT guy did it for the money:

> Not long after his 21st birthday, Christian Rodriguez got the contract of a lifetime for his new info-tech company: The Colombian was hired as a cybersecurity consultant by Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the Mexican drug lord known as El Chapo. While Mr. Rodriguez had little experience or formal education, he had been recommended by one of his other clients: Jorge Cifuentes Villa, a veteran trafficker who worked with Mr. Guzmán making cocaine deals with left-wing guerrillas in Colombia.

And from another article that I found:

> The government allowed him to keep the half-million he’d earned working for Guzman, and in addition paid him $480,000 for his expenses and technology services – which he later neglected to pay taxes on. Ref: https://www.courthousenews.com/sinaloa-cartels-it-guy-testif...
The question is whether these two goals conflict with each other.

Full freedom to run whatever you want also means being able to install malware.
I recommend that you use Route53 for DNS management.

If you're interested in running the application with Docker, Fargate can be a good option. You can also run the frontend on CloudFront.

For Redis and Postgres, you should consider RDS and ElastiCache which are managed services.

I would avoid using Kubernetes because it's probably too complex for what you're trying to do.
Alternatively now someone in Fresno who makes $25/hour doing something blue collar has access to a market where that same job may pay $40/hour. There is a huge amount of pent up demand for blue collar jobs in the Bay area that is being stifled due to the lack of appropriate living arrangements for people making non-six-figure incomes (especially for families).
excellent, thanks. I was not cynical enough, I see
Those $30 routers die after a year or two and seem to constantly have trouble in the interim--but I know exactly what you mean. I've gone out and purchased things for close friends and family just because I have to hear about it or support it.
A good point - a buddy uses certain commercial entities which will bid for you, for a little price of course. Apparently it's rather casual!
Activision Blizzard reports historic earnings amid big layoffs
Hi All,

Co-Founder of Halleman Bradley here, Calvin came on as our design intern originally and we've talked him into staying with us for even longer, he made this write up about how we've iterated in building this product over the last year.

I'd be happy to answer questions about our process, the details behind how we're doing this or anything else you all might be interested in.

We realize the write-up is long but I think it is quite a good read.

I hope you'll find this interesting
There's not a lot of benefit in the US. We have the most airports of any country in the world, great connectivity via air travel between our cities for fairly cheap, and the best ATC and airline safety record in the world. Airplanes are also faster (500MPH-600MPH vs 300MPH trains) and can go places where there is limited infrastructure.
Samsung Internet is great. It has built in support for content blockers, uses the Blink engine and everything renders well. I'd like to use Firefox on Android, but the performance and rendering on some sites is abysmal.
Hackers and Scammers Break into iCloud-Locked iPhones – Motherboard
Merced, Madera, Fresno, Tulare, and Kern counties have a combined population of ~2.9 million. For the $77 billion price tag, you could buy a Toyota Prius for every single resident of the entire area served by HSR (including children), and still have ~$8 billion left over.
As depression has an average course of 4 months I wonder what effects we should expect to see after years.
Google's New Cloud Boss Targets Old Issue: Selling to Big Firms
The user did decide to install the app, it wasn't forced onto them.

As long as user consented, the app should be allowed to do anything.
I spent a year at a “Great Books” college whose program Adler helped found. It was a really amazing luxury to be able to spend so much time on it (I left after freshman year, so I only got through the Greeks).

Ultimately, St John’s generates a lot of lawyers and humanities grad students, but not a whole lot else without extra pre-grad school to school to get some of the STEM prereqs out of the way. I love that the school generates humanities scholars, but it’s not my bag, so I moved on.

If I had the money, I’d love to go back and finish when I retire, but at 40 I’m already not as smart as I was in college, so I’m pretty sure I’ll be too dumb to be a useful classmate when I retire!

If you haven’t gotten to Euclid yet, do yourself a favor and get the Heath translations with his notes. A few of them are really, really hard for people trained in late second-millennia mathematics to be able to get through without some hints.
> Heartbleed really is the best example on how a critical piece of software infrastructure (including a lot of government regulated infrastructure) had a publicly visible
flaw that went undetected (and presumably unexploited) for
several years.

It's already been discussed in this thread how old OpenSSL is - it dates back to 1998 when the risk of buffer overflows was not as well understood or publicised as it is now. It has also been addressed that code audits of OpenSSL were done as a result, which has lead to both forks and patches.

In the context of the new, one liner graphics format proposed by the OP in 2019 that had an obvious bug written straight into its specification, this thread has now reached absurd levels.

> Again, I'm not saying nobody would possibly do it, but one does not automatically follow from the other.

Ok. I'll tell my customer we don't need all the firewalls, IDS, code inspection, risk assessment and hardening because zeroname on HN told me it was OK.

> I don't know man, I'm here arguing with this guy who doesn't seem to grasp a basic concept in logical reasoning, yet he's working on critical government infrastructure.

I'm not at all offended by your ridiculous insults, I feel rewarded every day that my team and I are working on something worthwhile, and also the white-knuckled fear on that goes with it on occasion when we worry whether we've missed something or not.

Let's just both be thankful you don't live in an area where my team provides emergency services then.

Again, have a nice day, "man".
I am not sure why people expect Amazon to offer the lowest prices. When I broke the habit to buy everything on Amazon, I found much better deals elsewhere. In fact, for those who know how expensive their fulfillment services are, that they keep raising the costs and the storage fees, you can't get a good deal on small ticket items at Amazon anymore.

Whole Foods where I live was pretty much empty before Amazon bought it. Now, I see some revival, but nothing like during the first days. But it's because you can find all these products elsewhere for much less.

I will give you an example for a niche product: I love Devon Double Cream. It's $6.99 at Whole Foods and $4.99 at another local store. The other local store sells it at $5.99. Well, I assume, the cost is around $3. How can Whole Foods sell stuff at such huge margin?!

When I was working with retailers back in Bulgaria in the '90s, the margin was 15-20%, and on some items - even below 10%. There were no deals, no coupons, no gimmicks, and stores were still making great profits from the volume. To be fair, there was a 5% fee f you wanted to pay with a charge card. This is no longer the case in America! When I see a 70% off sale, to me it's a clear signal never to set foot at that store! Even 30% off is scary!
California governor proposes data dividend
> To play devil's advocate... given that manifolds are so general, wouldn't it be more surprising if natural data didn't form some lower dimensional manifold?

No, because not all data can actually be represented on a topology. It's nice if you can model your data as a normed vector space, but it's not inherently possible in general.
If you ever need a new job, basically recruiters will laugh at you for not using React / Angular.
I don't think the process is any different from flying. You get out of your transport and take a shuttle to the closest car rental agency. There are tons of car rental agencies in LA and if there was a high speed train they would open up outlets near the train.
Most people already know how to ride a bike, for a start. E-bikes are also cheaper, cleaner, quieter, lighter, slower, (subject to power restrictions mentioned above) can be ridden on cycle paths, (here in the UK at least) require you to actually pedal to some degree and so have a fitness component, and come without the need for a license, insurance, MOT, road tax, and mandatory heavy protective gear, and require considerably less servicing, and can be easily wheeled into the house to prevent them being stolen. I like motorbikes etc. also and have been looking at them again after considering an e-bike because really if I'm considering dropping £3k on an e-bike why not just spend a little more for a motorbike and get rid of the range anxiety etc.? But I'd say the vast majority of people in the UK at least are never going to go to the hassle of getting a scooter/motorbike license whereas they would certainly contemplate buying what is effectively still a bike, but with an inoffensive strapped on power booster.
Really? I mean, how would you do something about it if it meant your whole family would be tortured to death? Set on fire? These guys have horrifically cruel methods of execution. And despite all that he did go undercover. Balls of steel if you ask me.
Labotomies are still done too. They are now more scientific and are used to control things like eplilepsy, but still involve cutting/burning through brain to sever connections.
Location: Denver, CO

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Angular, Node.js, MongoDB, JavaScript, jQuery

Resume: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jKKkK6u4JFUd9Ern6ImxBPYU...

Email: kylebnazario at gmail dot com

I work in news but am changing fields to frontend development. I know Angular and Node inside and out and need a foot in the door. Hoping a fellow HN reader can do help with that.
Can’t build a railway, can’t build The Wall, destroyed the cost of healthcare for most. The next time you big government types want more big government solutions, try to remember these outcomes.

All the bond money that went into this —- doesn’t the state owe big refunds to taxpayers? Or was that money added to the usual CA slush (i.e. not going to what it was approved for like a lot of CA tax increases).
It's been getting worse down there too. A buddy of mine works on the cell networks and hes been telling me that bodies are starting to be strung up on bridges even in tourist areas when people don't pay up or snitch. I'd go into more detail but at some point it's just gore.
please do, and let us know
I'm not Asian, but am curious to know why the word Asian is relevant in your post?
Tovala (YC W16) Is Hiring an Android Developer in the Bay Area
Some real estate in Hawaii is also "sold" in this way. The price of "Leasehold" property is generally less expensive than "Fee Simple" property.

https://www.mauirealestate.net/fee_simple.html