skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really don't get why trains can be so expensive and what we need to do to fix that.

To an extent, flying is just way too cheap. I mean, I was looking at a roundtrip london/barcelona just last week, it was $25. By train I'm looking at at least 10 hours, likely more like 15, and $300.

Both the $25 and the $300 just seem wrong. Flying is way too cheap, but I also don't get how $300 per person is competitive against something like a bus or shared car. The economics of trains should be able to be better than just about anything.
They are absolutely not cheap and mostly slow rather than fast.
It's useful to see what your peers are earning, especially for your next salary negotiation. And it's pretty obvious that if you don't live in SF, you shouldn't expect SF salaries.
Probably by using Twitter's API.
We have already found alien species.

Right here on this very same planet:

Dinosaurs.

We would have never even known about their existence if we had not chanced upon their remains.

So it's not just the vast distances of space that separates species from each other, it's also incomprehensible stretches of time.

Just from the amount of variables involved and their ranges (the number of planets, the extreme environments in which we have already observed life), it's obvious that we are not alone.

BUT we may never meet anyone.

Just like how there's billions of people on Earth but millions die alone, to use a topical metaphor given Valentine's Day. :)
> It would be cool with a completely offline SpeechRecognition

https://github.com/mozilla/deepspeech

This runs completely offline and is fast enough to run even on CPUs or smaller devices. Note though that it's not as accurate as an engine that requires TPUs for inferrence in order to be real time, which Google's engine probably does. World is full of tradeoffs...
Happily there's a world wide web that'll help you inform yourself.

Or I can tell you: You have to take the train to St. Petersburg and change there. Going to someplace like Paris you'd have to change one more time, and of course the trip would be long.
The Mind of a Pawnbroker
Is this based on fact it opinion?
Minority, maybe not. There's 20+ upvotes on my original comment re single-caller functions -- much more than replies contradicting it.
Troubled 737 Max Boeing airplane had at least 13 other safety incidents, ex-empl
The internet is an interesting place.

On one hand you have people saying 4G is good enough, and say 5G is hype only ( It is over hype, but surely not hype ), on the other hand you have people complaining about 4G capacity.

It seems most people when discussing 4G or 5G have absolutely no idea what Capacity and Bandwidth is about. They only care about absolute speed.
The thing is that if you want logic to go fast proper you don't use saturation logic (DTL/RTL/TTL), but current steering logic (ECL). That way your usable clocks gets much closer to the fT of the transistors involved, instead of being limited to a tiny fraction of it.

That's how Cray built supercomputers after the CDC6600/7600.
Studying Electrons, Bridging Two Realms of Physics
This is just a spreadsheet of tweets that share salary info, where do you see an implication that everyone should earn the same salary?

I believe this is intended to help people negotiate. Those of us who have a network of friends in tech get this information informally that way, but salary sharing like this gives people who don't have that network a starting point (albeit one riddled with selection bias and low sample size).
Man, I come from Italy and I have been living in Amsterdam for ten years now and I can assure you that the "unreliability" of Dutch trains is nothing compared to the constant huge delays and cancellations of Italian railways.

Sure, there might be room for improvement in some areas, but Dutch trains are the third most punctual in the world, after Japan and Switzerland: https://www.railtech.com/policy/2019/01/03/dutch-passenger-t...
Why Didn't Ancient Rome Have Dungeons and Dragons?
I think some commenters are forgetting how science is done. Just because you are researching X does not mean your only output is X. An investment into SETI is an investment in science and technology. All the arguments on this forum about why we should not allocate funds to SETI can be used in the same manner for why we should not investment in pure mathematics or any other potentially "useless" human endeavor. SETI researchers will come up with novel ways to solve their problems and invent new technologies along the way, the same as every other branch of science and engineering. It's how we got SETI@home and now boinc is used for lots of problems like protein folding (1).

Plus, for those of us that have read Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu (2), we understand that SETI research is the biggest gamble in scientific research. High risk with the highest reward. What could fundamentally change humanity more than definitively finding intelligent life out there?

Lastly, some commenters need to go read Carl Sagan's Contact. He goes over all of this nay-saying!

[1] https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Three-Body-Problem-Cixin-Liu/dp/07653...
Only if you do them often enough that you don’t forget the flags each time.
Sorry about that, works OK for me (FF 72.0.2/Ubuntu 19.10).
The entire medical field is based on opinion and wizardry. We're sicker and weaker than ever.
I've healed myself from various conditions by going carnivore.

Take it or leave it.
Where in the spreadsheet does it say salaries shouldn't be different? Information is usually a good tool you can use to your benefit. But if you don't find this information useful, no harm done to you.
It is a disease and survival has dramatically increased because of amazing progress in treatments. Just look at the recent drop in cancer mortality in the US.

It is incorrect and irresponsible to blame people who get cancer for eating badly etc. Sometimes things go wrong at a cellular level and cancer happens.
Sure, if you fly Düsseldorf - Stuttgart (companies do such things often), by all means switch to trains. For most of us it's not a reasonable alternative. My usual flight takes around 2 hours (7 hours door to door) but the train takes 16-17 hours including e.g. a two hour wait for transfer at 2 AM. The train also costs about 3 times as much. The climate's fate is not based on my 4 flights per year, so I refuse to have flight shame. Pushing the guilt onto normal people from industry is an appalling thing. (like fix your dripping tap, you're wasting fresh water... Ever heard how industry deals with water?)
I am terribly underpaid.
Does that mean that if I want to get between two cities inside the Schengen area, I need to get a visa?
Hyperbole. People will trade freely if they need to. Cash is not what prevents tyrants from coming to power, democratic societal structures do. Elections do. Having an educated population does. Cash didn’t save anyone from tyrannical rule.
Hi, CEO of opus.ai here.

Just noticed traffic coming from ycombinator and was almost worried as we're not ready to come out just yet (~2 months away).

Thanks for the mention though (and the clicks)

phew
When we find them there will be people that want to initiate contact. For centuries we were convinced the shark was the Apex predator of sea. I'm not really looking forward to the day we come across the orcas of the universe.
An interesting blog post on how that might be done: https://mrale.ph/blog/2018/02/03/maybe-you-dont-need-rust-to...
Going from Brussels to London is great with the Eurostar. It's fast, you can walk around to the bar, and don't have to show up too early.

So it depends, but obviously there are cases where they do offer a better alternative.
200 or 300 km/h

I wouldn't call that slow. Not as fast as a plane but it's not slow at all.
Agree totally. I think the same type of comment can be said of college computer science courses and high school classes. Students get bored to tears and wonder what all the excitement is about. Thankfully lots of stuff on internet somewhat counterbalances but usually only found by those looking and the bored have already moved on.
Those are usually airport fees and such, I don't know where you get these numbers, but the airline pays the airport for the use of the terminal, baggage handling, air traffic control, etc.

This is different from tax, as without it you would not fly.
Jet fuel is tax free, energy and diesel for trains is not.
https://simpleflying.com/eu-jet-fuel-tax/
http://archive.is/uEiv9
None of those is somehow intrinsic to train travel, as I’m sure you’re aware. Quality of service is just a function of priorities.
Thanks for clarification and additional info.
A broken arm is not a disease, but a state of body deterioration. You can't fix it; only the body can fix itself.

Stop attacking it with splints, plaster casts and slings, and give it the fuel it needs: unprocessed yellowcake Uranium.
> I really don't get why trains can be so expensive

They’re more expensive because they’re better.
Do you have examples of diseases named after a virus? I cannot think if any. (Edit: I found Ebola virus disease, Maburg virus disease and Nipah virus disease.)
Internationally speaking, trains in Netherlands are pretty good IMO. Dutch people love to complain about it because we're sticklers for being on time, but if you compare internationally Dutch trains really aren't so bad.
Just check https://levels.fyi also started out as a spreadsheet.
It all comes down to cost vs convenience. I don’t think rail is the answer long term. Trains are generally slower and less comfortable than air travel. Not to mention often similarly priced or more expensive.

I’m more excited by the prospect of electric/hydrogen powered regional air travel. IMHO that is what will start to make a real difference.
Dutch trains are actually highly punctual, especially when you consider how many people they are transporting.
Well firstly, you don't need to do any work on the terrain that the plane operates on. Meanwhile a train will require contiguous tracks. That might not be a huge hurdle if you need to get between two places with flat land between them, but add water, mountains, forests and whatnot, and that makes it much harder to get a train from one place to another. An airplane just needs two airstrips.
It is slow when it's directly competing with planes.
I see your point. But we're exposed to many risks in this fragile, densely populated metropolis, including flu epidemics, traffic accidents, terrorism, typhoons, earthquakes, and tsunamis, that we could avoid by staying home or living elsewhere. Once we have made the decision to keep living here, I guess many of us also decide to go on with our lives as best we can.
Good trolling on his part. New twitter account with no credible info about him to be found.
> Buy a Bahn Card 25

Why does buying an affordable train ticket always involve a treasure hunt of weird ticketing combinations and cards like this?
Zcash Foundation funds plan to help scale the Tor network
It includes people from all over the world. US skilled salaries are usually 2x+ (not just for tech, but also things like healthcare) salaries in Europe. Remember they have social safety nets and lower costs for things like education and healthcare, we do not.

Also this list has a very small sample size, and very few people from big tech, otherwise the pay would skew significantly higher.
In the one or two decades after privatizing the formerly state-owned passenger service things were bad.

Nowadays, the backlog in maintenance seems to be sorted out and things run generally well again.
Although I still plan a half hour safety margin when traveling to schiphol airport by train.
We should mandate that aviation fuel is 10% carbon neutral. And then steadily up that fraction yearly. How they satisfy that is up to them - synthetic fuels generated using solar/wind, biofuels, or whatever. The point is that we're not going to be able to replace liquid fuels for long-haul aviation, so we both need to factor in the increased cost of carbon-neutral fuels and at the same time provide a market that stimulates investment.

For many routes, if we did this, aircraft would perhaps not be price-competitive with rail. So be it.
If trains can be as cheap as flights then there will be no need to coerce people to choose flying over train through carbon footprint arguments.
I'm 196cm and airplanes are actually not as bad as fellow tall people always complain. I think I might have relatively short legs for my height.
This is an easy promise to make but remains empty without mentioning the difficulties of such undertaking. Europe has the most splintered incompatible mess of a railway system in the world. They barely managed to run high speed trains between fairly local and established big cities (Paris to Amsterdam). Then there's the problem of routing and adding stops. With a plane you can almost always get a direct flight or a single transfer inbetween. With trains you end up stopping several times wasting energy and time at stations completely irrelivant to you. I applaud the effort and hope it comes to fruition but i'm sceptical wether this is going to be a terrible political undertaking or a well thought out plan for inter European travel.
People here like to shit on Bitcoin and the like, but micropayments are an excellent way to reduce spam.
For that reason alone it seems so silly to me that Google would make this change and cause this headline to occur. Hell like the poor folks rest and vest as the worse case.
> Zurich to Paris just takes too long by train, and doing night trains isn't always an option.

It's a nudge over 4 hours by TGV from Zurich center to Paris center. That is almost certainly comparable to getting from city center to airport, checking in, waiting before flight, flying, waiting for bags, and getting to city center at the other end. Of course, if your source and destination are closer to the airport and you have no bags/minimize waiting time that might tip the flight in your balance but I doubt it'd be very far off in many cases. Personally I'd much rather take the train here -- I find it more comfortable and convenient than flying and for me the overall time taken is comparable.

It can also be cheap. I've had several €29 fares on that route.
> While I like the idea of traveling by train, and I even took a night train from Munich to Budapest in the past, but on that specific route I had to share my cabin with a guy who just got released from jail a day earlier so I was not pleasantly relaxed. The fact that the cabin only had 2 bunk beds and I was pretty much isolated from other passengers and I had no way to keep my money and other important things in a safe, made me worried a lot.

>The big advantage of air travel is exactly this, you don't need to spend much time in the actual plane. And the passengers are by definition under full-time supervision by other passengers, so stealing or attacks are not so easy to get away with.

There are also drawbacks to air travel that you're not mentioning. I was in a sleeping segment with 5 other people and felt more safe than in an airplane. The important thing though is: we need to cut down on carbon, and travel by train is an important way to do it.
> The $1/day / $10/month / $100/year has been fairly well received,

...in countries where $100 a year isn’t a lot for one subscription.

> but may not be for everyone, especially those who enjoy running their own VPN server and/or curating their own block lists.

...and also not for those in countries where $100 a year is a whole lot of money for one subscription.
There's no real drop, but number manipulation. They just label you as "healed" if the tumor doesn't return after a some short period of time, which gets shorter by the year.

Actually mortality rates are at all times high, globally.
Not sure it is still the case. MacOS Server have this function if you set it up your network, it will cache all your backup, App Update, iCloud Files and Photos on your Mac.

Something I wish they do for iOS Time Capsule.
I flew from Amsterdam to Dublin for €19. I then took the train from Dublin to Cork for ... €60. The distance from Amsterdam to Dublin is about 750km, three times as long as Dublin-Cork

(you can also take the bus for €15 or some such, but last time I did that I got rather carsick, so I figured I'd take the train, not knowing how expensive it was!)
https://rhasspy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Rhasspy is fully offline and uses grammars to increase accuracy just like you said.
I wish the author here or Dave Thomas would explain what they mean by DRY meaning “knowledge”. They both say that and leave it as obvious...
The train from Zurich to Paris is a TGV with included (mandatory?) seat reservations, air conditioning and plenty of bag space.
Well, that depends.

2 adults from Valencia to Madrid and with return for 70€ at a max speed of 300km/h.

We should also take in consideration that planes are cheap because they have become the main mean of transport for long distances for the last decades.

I can't see why we couldn't do this with trains. Invest in infrastructure and use it as much as we can.
I think you’re arguing against something I didn’t say.

Editorial doesn’t live in a hole where metrics are unknown to them, but their primary focus is the content.

I had a look at your linked paper. It was a lot of opinion and questionable experience.

There is an enormous amount of context missing and the paper seems to have been written looking for a problem and attempting to prove it versus an observation that was derived purely out of experience.

It’s my birthday this weekend and I’m meeting family soon so I don’t have the time to do a deep dive right now, but there are many factors I’d like to point out that may help provide context for that paper.

One is the consolidation of media in Canada. The National Post is an outlet founded by the infamous Conrad Black after the Financial Post to legitimize his further right-wing viewpoints as well as provide a national voice for them. It’s traditionally been known for being factually accurate in its news reporting, but has increasingly become polarizing and filled with shock writers and hardline opinion columns as one of its early goals was to insert a new, further right political voice in Canadian media and to convert readership to that viewpoint.

As part of that mission the Postmedia group (National Post’s parent organization) has been purchasing small town and city news outlets including the Hamilton Spectator central to the paper. The purchased newsrooms have been reduced in size and much of the papers’ content is syndicated from the parent source. The approach is eerily similar to that of Sinclair Media in the United States.the parent company is also known for its less scrupulous business practices.

One outlets practices does not make an industry or profession, no matter the country or region that the article focuses on.

The article you linked also contains this:

> “Journalists in the past were far removed from what was happening on sales etc. but now a journalist’s story is linked to things like Google links, social media platforms – and when there is no readership a journalist would have failed the organization” (interviewee, Tiso Black Star Group, 11 April 2017)

The first part of that seeming crucible is exactly what I noted. The second has never been untrue. Those journalists are not typically fired for their stories not driving readership, they’d be reassigned. Publishing has always been about readership. I’m not sure where the shock comes from there. Journalists still don’t sit staring at the monitors.

At least in my experience they have too bloody much to do because they’re short-staffed as corporate holders are looking to save money because owning a media outlet isn’t the hot “asset de la mode” it was in the 90s.
To answer your point directly: for sure, I have a bias that the majority of scientists who work in cancer research generally mean well. But holding a positive view of (bias towards?) such people and their motives doesn't constitute not being willing to criticise science?

--

In this case, my frustration is that the author isn't intelligently criticising the science; I totally agree with you that science (and related issues, such as FDA approvals, or cost:benefit analyses of drugs) should of course always be open to exploration and criticism.

Instead, he's written an opinion piece masquerading as science, by using a variety of supportive quotes and excerpts to build a general case that cancer is big business, that there's a kind-of dark nefarious industry behind it all, and that people who work in this area are complicit in hurting patients with cancer. (It feels one step away from a conspiracy theory.) By confusing totally different topics (e.g. marketing of cancer drugs, vs. value of screening, vs. cost:benefit of cancer treatments, vs. side-effects of cancer drugs, etc.), by paying insufficient attention to any of them, and by employing such a broad brush, he turns a set of highly complex topics into a pointless oozing vat of negativity, possibly aligned with his workd-view.
There's a massive chicken/egg problem with storage: without storage nobody will build more renewables than can be routinely absorbed by the grid and without that oversupply there's no economical incentive to build storage.

I think it might be best to feign defeat on finding a clever integrated solution and stubbornly make all the building blocks of power-to-gas profitable independently (through regulation, obviously).
Do you think SAP will come up with a cloud provider to compete with aws and the like? I don't know if there is another European software company big enough for that.
Yeah, but we are still missing those inputs form the previous life years that lead to cancer, ie exposure to chemicals through work, diet, etc as its the environmental load that matters here combined with the genetics profile of course
C'mon, everyone knows that.
> If it's not external, it's not an application programming interface

Splitting hairs, I think. Even if not intended, someone else may assume your "documentation" function was meant to be generally accessible (i.e. an API), and call it that way.
Links in Source Code Comments: Purpose, Evolution, and Decay (2019)
I feel that. Though I don’t have to live in a CA hellscape where half my paycheck has go to rent.
We should mandate taxes are paid on fuel, they dump fuel before landing. Which has a worse impact on the greenhouse effect.
This horror story would be enough to quit the entire FAANG game:

"At one particular ‘top’ tech company the process is that when a candidate goes through an interview he or she has a packet compiled about their interview performance. The packet then goes to a committee whose job it is to impartially review the packet to make a hiring decision. At one point a particular committee got so critical that they rejected every packet for several months. When HR caught wind of this they decided to set up a test. They sent the committee a new round of packets and once again the committee rejected them all. HR then called them all into a meeting and explained that they packets they had just reviewed were in fact the hiring committee member’s own packets from when they interviewed for that company. They had unknowingly rejected themselves! How could anyone pass that bar?"