skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems that every major American infrastructure project is dominated by concerns other than building a practical, efficient forms of transportation.

Transportation projects are dominated by politics, handouts, corruption and excessive opposition to transportation even existing, while ignoring practical and common sense ideas.

The Cal High speed rail is a perfect example. Routes that don't serve major population centers, fights over land use, fights over whether a rail line should even exist, circuitous routes to reward political supporters, lack of transparency and auditing tools, cost overruns and corruption...

There's a good write up here: https://www.city-journal.org/californias-high-speed-rail-pro...

Europe and Asia just build transit to be transit. In the US at least, if something actually gets built and used it's just a nice side effect.
I basically agree, but one thing I've begun to wonder about is the "through terrain that isn't too challenging" part, given that the Central Valley has been sinking in parts because of aquifer depletion.
The problem isn't having limits on the free tier. The problem is changing the services for existing accounts (free or otherwise), in this case to completely cripple free accounts. I wouldn't even complain if they only applied the 3-device restriction to new free accounts
Here is a detailed list of the missing $103.5 K, from another article with more details on this couple:

Childcare (Two Children)- $42K

Food for four (includes date night every two weeks) - $23K

Home Maintenance - $5K

Property Insurance $2.5K

Gas - $5K

Car insurance - $2K

Life Insurance ($3 million term) $2.5K

Clothes for four people (no fancy bags, shoes or threads) $9.5K

Childrens Lessons (sports, piano, violin, academics) $12K

Total - $103.5 K

https://www.financialsamurai.com/scraping-by-on-500000-a-yea...
This could use a (2012), per the article date.
Why use this over an apple watch or fitbit?
Worrying about the glycemic index immediately makes things complicated. People with certain conditions may need to worry about it, but a normal person can easily get caught in analysis paralysis and lose the forest through the trees.

It's not the people eating a chicken breast, mixed veggies and a side of rice who are obese and unhealthy.

I see people go through all sorts of rationalizations to eat a cookie, and then stress over the glycemic index of a bit of rice. Sigh.
Why do you think its OK to import people you can maximally exploit as live in slaves to safeguard the most important things in your life.

The minimum wage for NYC is $15 an hour and ultimately if you pay the minimum you get your pick of the worst employees.
Can't wait until it is V8 V8 ;)
500k is pre-tax. The federal and state income taxes would be about $150k.
The poor are eligible for Pell Grants, which covers 60% of the tuition of the average public college, and historically covered even more. Nonetheless, college completion rates for the bottom quantile are 1/4 that of the top quintile. There are many other barriers to college attendance for the poor. There is a large opportunity cost—if you are attending college, you can’t work to support your family. To the contrary, your family still has to support you. The social fabric in poor neighborhoods often are frayed, with gangs and drugs and crime distracting kids from school. As a result, children from poor areas often aren’t motivated to apply to college, wouldn’t be accepted even if they applied nor would they be prepared for college coursework if they were admitted. The end result is that most people benefitting from free college would be middle class people who don’t have those other barriers.

If you look at countries that have free college, most have college completion rates similar to or lower than the US: https://www.in.gov/che/files/DMatthews.pdf. The vast majority of the EU population lives in the U.K., Germany, Italy, France, and Spain. All of those countries have lower college completion rates among people 25-34 than the US, even with tuition being cheap or free in those other countries. While tuition is not a barrier to college attendance in say Germany, college is still primarily something for the middle and upper middle class.

Programs that theoretically offer “equal opportunity to all,” but where the middle class gain the lion’s share of benefits, is not an efficient way to better the lives of the poor.

(The same thing with Medicare for All versus the ACA. In Europe, the middle class pay for their own health care, and also subsidize the poor. In Germany, public health insurance premiums are 15% of income, with folks making above $70,000 being exempt from the public system. The ACA is similar—premiums are capped at 0-10% of income for folks making less than $50,000. That’s even more generous than the German system for folks making low incomes. The folks who feel the pinch are middle class people, for whom a 10% premium is a lot when they’re used to having a much lower tax burden than what they would have in Germany. Consequently, replacing ACA with Medicare for All would primarily benefit middle class people, especially if funded through a progressive tax.)

The plight of the poor (who are worse off in the US than the poor in the big EU countries), is unfortunately being used as a fig leaf. The American middle class (who are better off than the middle class in the big EU countries) wants the safety and security of a European style welfare system, but doesn’t want to pay a 40% tax as they would in Europe, a 20% VAT, etc. Even though you could dramatically improve the lives of the bottom 50% through targeted programs, progress on that front gets held hostage to a broader push to have the rich pay for middle class welfare.
This can go for just about any social problem.

"We have to do something about X!"

"Here's what sacrifices you can make to help..."

"Oh, I meant we need to help, not me."
In a way it has, but only in a way. Though this is not an open figure, insiders estimate 80% are gay in Vatican and orgies and underage prostitutes (poor male African immigrants) are brought inside the Vatican for debauchery. The problem is not the gay lifestyle but the abuse that many children suffer at the hands of the clerics.

Apparently stems from the involuntary celibacy policy in Catholicism. Vatican is nothing holy, it's just people with their problems, corruption, pettiness.. IMHO i see no possibility for any kind of reform.
not to mention the $50~200k on specialized test equipment you will have to buy to even start on this path.

Nobody mentions this.

In every wire rat nest CPU picture, there is always several thousand dollars of digilent and HP gear out of the frame.
This is called Fredkin's Paradox[0] for those who are curious.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredkin%27s_paradox
Yeah but Google has serious bonafides as far as delivering high-res video at scale. Stadia is just Youtube with input handling and a game renderer instead of video files producing the frames.
But less damaging than, say, keeping them socially isolated.
The sooner FB just dries up and dies, the better (IMHO). What do we need that junk for?
It's strange to me how people imbue simple no-nonsense infrastructure projects with so much mental baggage.
I disagree, if reading books can increase empathy [0], then I'd expect any activity that forced you to experience the way another person lives would do the same.

[0] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/342/6156/377
When I was in college I preferred take-home coding challenges and whiteboard coding questions than talking through experiences.

...Because I had no experience, and school projects didn't count.

I had time that no one is paying for, I had skills (at least i believed), but no interviews because of experience. So coding challenge is the one thing that I can compete fairly with people with experiences, and I even had an edge because I value my time less.

Of course, now I don't. But I was thankful that it is a thing so I can land my first job.
it depends. do you have 314 in disposable income? is health really important for you?
And New York, and Massachusetts, and Illinois, and probably most other states.
Gross 500K, you're probably working with 300K after Fed/CA/SF taxes..

138K for rent.

76K for childcare if all four (might get a nanny cheaper)

Student loans because you both went to an Ivy League

Two cars, cell phones, real organic food, savings..

Maybe one big family vacation.

It adds up.

You won't be flying to Paris every weekend on a private jet.
And people have been dying in general since the dawn of humanity. Dying young is the effect of far more than food. So I would argue dying young is an equally bad metric to make your case.
Can you give more details on the interest only mortgages? I haven't seen that offered anywhere.
Startups really do seem to be the best solution to problems like these. Elon Musk is leading teams that are solving some of the world's biggest problems. Those efforts greatly benefited from government subsidies, funding, etc.

Let's just admit finally that governments are really only good at writing checks, that they suck at managing projects, and then just work very hard figure out where those checks should go.

Our governments(s) should give a bunch of teams $10M to design projects, then a few teams $100M to prototype them, and then one or two teams the billions required to build them out. I bet there's a qualified and moral person on HN that could lead a successful high speed rail project with government backing.
I wish my two year old would sleep 10 hours a night.
Especially if they are picking up someone else’s tab food could easily be $200 a day in a big city. If you add in other random things like female beauty products and services, can/Uber, or if both or alcoholics $100k of misc year expenses is very realistic and might even involve personal restraint keeping it down.
The current default isn't going to end well either.

The obvious solution is a wealth tax instead of income taxes. Take back the money that's been privatised, end the pointless and inefficient boom and bust hamster wheel, and spend bigly on productive social investment - education, gamechanger R&D, small business development, aerospace, robotics, AI, renewables, and other physical infrastructure.

Why isn't this happening already?
Oh please, just stop with the romanticism of high speed rail. It has little viability outside of very select areas and even the EU isn't exactly being well served by it. This loss of funds is probably the best result for California because now they can blame Trump for its collapse. The sheer audacity of continuing the project with a limited route between two small cities shows just how much political weight is invested in this. [1]

The ECA's new report [2] shows that it suffers from cost over runs, little inter connectivity, and has issues achieving the speeds promised. Can it be fixed, not without a lot of time, money, and cooperation between competing groups. That last is probably impossible.

Yet we must understand that is the smaller areas needed to travel it is far more suited to Europe than America except in very narrow corridors and even that is stretching the truth. Where it works is where the population numbers are large enough to support and other travel options are highly limited. However in the US and EU it servers mostly well to do people. higher middle income and up and rarely if ever the lower ends of society who don't have the means for travel. It is a political toy that results in lots of press opportunities and largess spread among supporters, both in the US and EU

[1] https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-california-hi...

[2] https://www.eca.europa.eu/Lists/ECADocuments/SR18_19/SR_HIGH...
I could see tools like this being used to disseminate false information to scare people into supporting certain policies. We are often sufficiently disconnected from the actual physical source of news/media that all it takes to believe something is to see an image (much like deep fakes). The threshold for believing now has to change from reading/seeing to actually being there and touching it. Or some far more reliable system of remote verification has to be established.
Snakebite crisis gets US$100M boost for better antivenoms
I am halfway through and I definitely have reservations, too. He does have an angle and it shows. That said, I'm concentrating on the facts and the nature of the systems involved, and that alone makes me question the hubris of saying "we know how to safely build and maintain nuclear plants".
Not just CA, TX has similar issues with a PRIVATE HSR that the land owners simply won't let be built.

https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/04/texas-central...
You're right about that being a plot for True Detective. Although the city of Vinci plot is very much based on the real Vernon, the high speed rail plot not so much (at least from what I understand): https://www.laweekly.com/news/just-how-ridiculous-is-true-de...
The US desperately needs to figure out how to do big infrastructure projects like this. High-speed rail is a critical piece of a greener economy, because it can truly compete with air travel at medium distances, and blows car travel out of the water. It's really unfortunate that the political incentives seem to be that Republicans are just outright opposed to any kind of government infrastructure spending unless it's a money-making scheme for their donors, and Democrats want to defend any project that sounds good, and damn the costs or whether it's actually successful.

What we need is a willingness to do major, expensive projects (high-speed rail is just not going to cheap in California, or anywhere), and ruthless commitment to making them happen efficiently. When a project like this fails in this way, all it does it play into the hands bad-faith actors who will never support major infrastructure projects. Then, people who are acting in good faith oppose them too, because there aren't enough counter-examples of successful projects.
London added the entire population of Berlin in the last 20 years or less. Berlin gets on that list because of the nation state it resides in having significant world status and economic output, and not because Berlin is of any presence in the world.

It is a burden on its nation*

*https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2016/08/S...
But the rendering happens at the server. You'd still need a local GPU to do reprojection for the headset.
Why are so many people running for president and so few for mayor?
Facebook's brand is tainted enough now that smart engineers don't want any of the bleedover into their personal brand that would come from working there.

How many engineers, in hiring positions, do you know that have a positive opinion of FB?
The McMansions are uglier anyway. Is your right to not look at ugly boxes more important than other people’s right to have a home for less than $2 million?
Hasn’t happened in London yet, or Hong Kong or Bombay or any other world class city open to the elite. The wealth my change hands, but the number of elites is monotonically increasing. It doesn’t matter if none of the locals can afford it.
Forget the election, just what social networking is doing to young people's minds. They're making money by making a lot of people miserable - just not how I'd want to make a living.
That really does embody the spirit of US infrastructure projects: "I'm here to make some money, and if {$infrastructure} gets built along the way, that's fine too, but by no means a deal-breaker."
"In general, Facebook candidates are asking much tougher questions about the company’s approach to privacy, according to multiple former recruiters."

That made me smile <3
That was back in 1997....

I’m sure they aren’t using the same infrastructure.

But that being said. My pictures and videos are automatically synced to:

Google Drive: (free, resolution reduced theoretically)

OneDrive

BackBlaze: iPhone -> OneDrive -> BackBlaze.
The Achievement of Vasily Grossman
When I was young I used to laugh at the middle-agers living dull lives. Not anymore, the joke's on me.
People pay for private k-12 because there's a perception of the public schools being awful (and it may be true depending on the area). But if you live in a nice area with a well-funded school district, paying for private school is just ego. You won't get much of a difference in learning outcomes
Not going to say it works for everybody. I was having a lot of GI issues and was diagnosed with IBS. Decided to try GF before committing to taking medicine 4 times a day, indefinitely...and it just happened to work.

The weight loss was an unexpected side effect.
You can drop the "if". Almost everything sold by a supermarket is junk food. Avoiding junk food at the supermarket is almost impossible.
Fixed WISP may be 5G's highest and best use over the next decade. I believe Verizon saw the writing on the wall and wisely fobbed off their FiOS-enhanced infrastructure to Frontier for what they could in, amongst other places, Sarasota and Pinellas Counties.
Research Design Patterns
The Boston tunnel was a pretty great example of the massive weight politics and hiring/mismanaging bad gov contractors puts on every infrastructure project (it "started" in 1982, broke ground in 1991, and finished 2007 at 200% over budget):

> The Big Dig was the most expensive highway project in the US, and was plagued by cost overruns, delays, leaks, design flaws, charges of poor execution and use of substandard materials, criminal arrests, and one death. The project was originally scheduled to be completed in 1998 at an estimated cost of $2.8 billion (in 1982 dollars, US$6.0 billion adjusted for inflation as of 2006). However, the project was completed in December 2007 at a cost of over $8.08 billion (in 1982 dollars, $14.6 billion adjusted for inflation, meaning a cost overrun of about 190%) as of 2006.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig
What sort of take homes are you seeing for data science roles?
Get Your Book, Make It Free
As a senior/lead developer with years of broad experience you don't need to remember details of every algorithm in existence. But you should keep information scrap in your head to guide you or your apprentice to relevant source of information.

"Hi <dev name>! I think we may need to optimize memory consumption of this distinct element counting code a bit; I remember there is some HyperLogLog algorithm which should help here... let's check how it goes... (reading Wikipedia page)[0]"

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperLogLog
> But opponents of the legislation argued that the changes anticipatedunder SB 50 would have unalterably diminished the quality of life in many California neighborhoods dominated by single-family home development.

Interesting. The quality of life in such neighborhoods seems to me to be some of the lowest in the nation. Sure there are worse places but overall, in my experience, such neighborhoods have no stores, no desirable public lands where people spend any time, and really nothing at all other than houses and ghost streets. One needs a car to go anywhere. There is nothing to do, no one to see, and no one to interact with. It's no wonder people who live there end up using drugs and coping with a ton of anxiety and depression. It's one of the worst places to raise teenagers and young adults especially ones not old to drive. Having lived in such neighborhoods all my life, I still can't understand what people are talking about in regards to the quality of life. The quality of life is shit. But I can see putting up with that for more money. I guess that's what they mean by quality of life. Low taxes and home value appreciation.
China has HSR in its hinterlands. SF to LA is nothing when compared to Lanzhou to Urumqi at 200-250kph.
ReadyNAS products have also been using it for even longer.

They don't use the RAID support from BTRFS (they do it themselves in software a level up using mdadm), only the snapshot, COW and general storage.

There very occasionally (based on forum posts) seem to be issues with metadata fragmentation for some people when there's a lot of metadata, but otherwise seems very reliable (I've got two myself).
Wait, 40 counts as middle aged? I guess I'm middle aged. Now THAT is truly depressing.
True AI on a Raspberry Pi, with No Extra Hardware
Yes, but you haven't heard of them yet.
You're saying it's reasonable for kids to eat up twice the median U. S. household income? Yeah, somehow that math doesn't add up to me. There's "expensive", and there's "you've got to be blowing money on stupid shit".
If it were truly only addressing the problems of big cities, then why would developers feel the demand to build in more suburban areas? Clearly this isn't only a big city problem.
The linked CNN article[1] breaks it down as essentially $52k on childcare and expensive child activities, 23k on food including some undoubtedly expensive "date nights" and the rest on the sort of insurance and maintenance costs you incur when everything you have is very expensive. The Bloomberg author's probably aiming to make it seem even more frivolous by having "other" as a massive line item, not that I'm convinced sure many people facing real rather than self-imposed spending constraints would consider $9k per annum on "no fancy bags, shoes or threads" clothing an example of the sort of thriftiness the article subjects seem to think they're demonstrating, or $23k to be a food budget for two adults and two kids that couldn't possibly be trimmed a little...

[1]https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/06/budget-breakdown-of-a-couple...
Even I was surprised by the timeline. A high speed train by 2033, really? China has them now, Japan has them now. India is building a bullet train with roughly the same length as SF to LA in 3 years. The US shouldn't be so slow compared to these other countries.
I agree that your house is in itself not savings and that taking out a mortgage to buy property doesn't count as savings, and one can have long discussion about if and when taking out a mortgage to by house is a sound financial decision. However once you have the house and the mortgage, then paying down that mortgage is savings, just not a very liquid form of savings. You can argue that it isn't the best and most efficient form of saving and depending on what the interest rates are and where you think interest rates are going you might be able to do something better with your money, but that is beside the point.
Does the Apple Watch do sleep tracking out of the box now? I was one of the 5 people who bought a Microsoft Band, and I really enjoyed the sleep tracking features. I still haven't pulled the trigger on an Apple Watch since switching to and iPhone because it (used to?) lack sleep tracking as a feature.
> Often poor parents don't care about school other than a cheap daycare and so they don't fund the public schools well either.

I think that’s a bit of an unfair characterisation. Most parents do want their children to have good educations.

Without having any source or data to back up this claim, I would expect that the difficulties faced by poorly funded schools full of poor pupils are not due to parents not caring about the schools or their children.
> So assign the job to people who can focus on just that

This requires having a person who can. We never had one.

> community volunteers can often do a better job than the core team for an FAQ

Absolutely! The original version was written by the community. After such a heroic effort, they couldn't maintain it. I believe it was a lack of time, not desire, but regardless, that's just how it goes.
TCP delaying packets after a network partition is over (YugaByte DB Jepsen test)
Hmm... the headline is in direct contradiction with what I read on Blind. People are still flocking at Facebook's gate for an offer.
> importing an au pair

No idea if this is the right terminology or not, but it makes it sound really weird in a bad way.