skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Admittedly, I'm no expert on electric cars, but they always make me feel like the emperor isn't wearing any clothes.

Electricity is frequently generated by fossil fuels like coal. Electric cars don't reduce pollution, they just move it to wherever the coal is being burned.

You have to get the electricity to the car from the far-away power plant, which means you're going to suffer from transmission loss (e.g. not every watt that is generated is going to make it to your drivetrain).

Finally, we suck at making batteries. They're still big heavy lumps of highly toxic materials that wear out in relatively short amounts of time. What do you do with all the exhausted batteries?

Like everyone, I'm all for making our infrastructure more environmentally-friendly. Sadly, I'm not convinced electric vehicles are anywhere close to where we'd need them to be. I feel like we have a lot of misplaced enthusiasm from people who want to clean up the industrial age a lot sooner than we realistically can.
I guess the two could compliment each other if the automated cars were more like taxis, and their main purpose was to move people to and from train stations.

That's the biggest problem I can see with train travel in the US... the country is too spread out so you need some sort of flexible integrated travel to support the trains.
Peter Hessler's "Country Driving" is a great book which second part is on topic.
Thanks for the tip. You are of course right, according to Wikipedia the UK is only partially part of the Schengen zone. I must have confused it with Denmark which is not part of the Euro zone, but part of the Schengen zone.
380 miles is a hell of a commute. That's going to take two hours each way (plus travel to/from stations), unless we manage to build a maglev or something. I do expect large-scale airlines to be infeasible to fuel someday, but by then I don't think we'll be able to operate this either. I just don't see the use case.

Edit: They're actually figuring 2.5 hours and 430 miles, due to an excursion through Freno and Bakersfield: http://www.cahighspeedrail.ca.gov/trip_planner.aspx
"The only institution that can provide immediate relief is the ECB. As the lender of last resort, it must do more to save the banks by offering unlimited liquidity for longer duration against a broader range of collateral."

This line of thinking is been pushed a lot. Its a one sided view. Why is it so difficult to understand the German point of view, or at least put it across to readers ? Germany insists that covering up the problems by printing money is just treating the symptoms not the root cause. The root cause is the bad monetary policies at some of member nations. They correctly understand than politicians guarantee of fixing the bad monetary issues (once printing is done) is wishful thinking. What they want is either go through painful process of austerity in these nation or tighter political/financial integration where member nations have say on finance budgeting in countries (in which case there could be common bonds).

I am neither a US or EU resident. I am not a finance guy. But the approach taken by Germany seems very sensible to me. What i see over and over again is the US/UK media and economist pushing for the solution that they have taken in their countries (monetary easing), to solve EU problems. Is there a agenda in this or whether its just that they want to make their policies appear right is open question.

I for one think that if Germany gets through this crisis (without blind printing) it will open the new era of EU dominance in the world. EU would come out as the most financially prudent currency and society (a more integrated union, almost like a country). In such a case the high debt, bad finance strategies of US/UK appear foolish.

Keep going Germany ! Long live EU
The first campaign of Dungeons & Discourage (with musical accompaniment)
200-300 mph autonomous cars? Getting the right of ways only gets harder for trains. The only reason that it's going to take so long is because people are in the way, a lot of people.

In 30 years, the trains can be swapped out for 400 mph Maglevs.
Too many hours worked
How many hours worked is too many? My daughter in law who works as a manger for Mcdonalds just worked from 10 am to 6 pm the next day (36 hours) because of call offs. Then she had to go in at 6 am the next day. She is hourly. Is this legal?
I'm not sure how anyone reads these articles without reaching the obvious conclusion that we've achieved abject fiscal insanity.

"...the ECB. As the lender of last resort, it must do more to save the banks by offering unlimited liquidity for longer duration against a broader range of collateral." "And since conditions are tightest in the peripheral [failing] economies, the ECB will have to buy their bonds disproportionately."

Modern economics somehow deny every amount of basic common sense. The only way to fix irresponsibility is apparently to reward it and encourage more. Nobody ever thinks about how to compartmentalize risk and failure, how to reduce the size and influence of financial institutions that threaten economic stability. I'm sure someone from Europe can better fill in the gaps on who stands to profit here and who's pulling the strings.
I'm going to throw out my opinion here (for discussion), but I should preface it by thanking you, I learned a lot from your post.

It seems large companies have a few distinct advantages:

1. They can operate divisions at a loss (e.g. Microsoft Entertainment and the XBox 1). They can "ride out" a down economy. This would be like having an angel with really deep pockets.

2. Stronger negotiating position in all cases: employees, clients, and vendors. Again, the investor network can compensate here for startups.

3. Kind of an outcome of #1 and #2: brand and leadership longevity. Sometimes you really can know more after having operated a business for decades.

My opinion is that all those advantages could create barriers to entry... but the big co's have enough problems of their own to let small co's innovate past them.

IMO this is good for both the large and the small, and especially good for the market: the established players can bring huge resources to bear on optimizing "solved" problems. The startups bring the right mix for getting ahead of the curve.
here, we like working highly illegally and underpaid

why work for something you don't love
how many immigrants would it be necessary to let in the country to have one of these success stories?? If we let in only the best and brightest, then success is assured! But if we do the right thing, and let nature take it's course....Assuming that the person is a 1 percenter, then it would only take one hundred people to create wealth. On the other hand, the united states has 300 million people, if 25 percent of the successful startups are by foreigners, then that would mean about 75 million people would have to enter the country to create 25 percent. All for 15 or 20 THOUSAND jobs. What will the rest do??
You can't simply "swap" out trains for maglev, it's a completely different infrastructure with different requirements.
> "Why should Americans feel any urgency about changes in immigration policy when they know that most people who might like to come to the United States will instantly have more access to food and housing as soon as they set foot in America?"

Because things out there aren't nearly as bad as the average American believes. As an Asian immigrant to North America, it's constantly shocking how backwards many Americans imagine the rest of the world to be. Yes, much of the world has running water, sewage systems, fast food, and the internet.

Not everywhere else in the world is begging for a National Geographic special, or commercials full of starving babies pleading for your aid. The India of 1980 is not the same as a the India of 2011. The China seen in Tiananmen Square is not the same China one sees today. Many Americans' impressions of the rest of the world seem firmly rooted in the Cold War.

It used to be true that moving to the USA meant pretty much a guaranteed, dramatic rise in the standard of living. But guess what? America's QOL is dropping precipitously, while parts of the world previously considered "developing" can now give America a run for its money in terms of QOL. There's a great equalization going on, and that is why the US needs to worry about its immigration policy.

Ten years ago immigrating to the West was the thing. People would smack their own grandmothers silly for a chance at a one-way ticket out of Asia and into America. You would be surprised how quickly this has changed. I've known many people who came to the US and Canada for degrees and then have voluntarily gone back to Asia, despite offers to stay.

tl;dr: America needs to get its head on straight, it's no longer the gold standard for quality of life in this world.
Moving the electrical generation to a central point allows you to build more sustainable power plants that only really work at scale - just try building a windmill on a single car, or a nuclear plant that can fir in your trunk.
Yes, Handlebars. I much prefer {{this}} to {{.}}, which at first glance looks a bit like a Perl 6 or Haskell operator rather than a dot surrounded by tags.
If you're trying to imply that I "stole" the comment, I posted it in the article comments after posting it here (note the usernames). Figured it might spark some discussion for people not coming from HN.
I'd be willing to bet good money that there will be high speed trains between LA & SF before there are widespread robo-cars.

- it's a hard problem, in my mind comparable to general AI, which has been "10 years away" since the 1950's. It seems to me to be one of of those "hard 10%" problems where you get what you think is 90% there, but the last 10% takes a lot longer than the first 90%.

- I believe that a generational change will be required to get over the strange attachment most Americans have to conventional cars

- American litigiousness will put manufacturers out of business. They might be safer than normal cars, but at some point they're going to kill or seriously injure somebody, and then they're going to come in for huge damage awards.
Your site will likely not be scraped unless/until it takes off. And once that happens, you'll have your foothold and no me-too site is going to surpass you unless they add more/better content. I wouldn't worry about it at this stage.
It's also complicated by the legal framework. My (limited) understanding of the problems with CDOs in 2008 was that multiple buyers could purchase insurance on the same bond. It's like if I could buy fire insurance on your house. If a lot of us did that and your house burned down, the insurer would have been on the hook for many times the cost of the underlying asset. This is why we had to bail out AIG.

When it's spelled out like that, the idea seems preposterous. But the legal framework allowed it -- in certain contexts. AIG et al call them "CDOs" instead of just "insurance" so they could avoid the more-restrictive legal framework governing the insurance industry.

And given that a typical CDO is the size of a Manhattan phone book (remember those?), there obviously is a lot of nuance that a lot of people did not understand.
I'm Canadian, I'd argue Canada is receiving the benefits of immigrant-entrepreneurs.

There are considerable innovations coming out of that country - the fact that it's not a hotbed for internet startups seems hardly relevant in the big picture. Businesses are being created by immigrants, who are creating wealth and employment in their respective communities. The fact that this in general has nothing to do with dotcoms is really a detail. Canada continues to be extremely competitive in traditional engineering disciplines, and is world-leading in many fields of science, not least of which is molecular engineering. The University of Toronto, after all, still holds the patent on insulin.

Next time you see a video of the International Space Station, with its bleeding-edge, unprecedented robotic arm, see if you can zoom and see which nation's flag is on it. Or dig into the US's collection of scientific and communications satellites and see how much of their R&D actually occurs in Canada.

I hope people on HN realize that the word "innovation" applies to all manners of fields. So often I feel like this community has blinders on, and very narrowly define "innovation" as "things that occur in my field".
Why didn't LA fund mass transit 40 years ago instead of building more roads? The US now has 100 million more people, so building bullet trains is going to be more costly. However, in 40 more years, I imagine that it will be even more difficult with 400 million Americans. We really need to invest in moving people and goods a more effectively now.
So what's the reason Americans feel this way? Is there any fundamental reason why efficient governments are bad?

What does it mean to say that a government "governs the least"? Does it make the fewest number of laws? Does employ the fewest number of people? Does it spend the least money? All of the above? Some of the above? Why are these good?
Plus there is usually a seller trying to convince you why buying is such a great idea.
The biggest hurdle is probably property rights. The second biggest would be clearing a path (building bridges, leveling the ground, etc). Those two would be solved now, and the rest could essentially be "swapped" out. It wouldn't be trivial, but you'd have the two toughest problems already solved.
To be honest, I have never seen the appeal of logic-less templates to begin with. I can understand wanting a sandboxable template engine independent of language, but that doesn't necessarily translate to "lack of logic."

And yeah, it's easier to shoot yourself in the foot with templates that have logic, but on the other hand with logic-less templates you may need to do something that the template language won't let you do, and then you have to go and write some more code in your domain logic. Which means that you're doing something even worse than pushing your business logic into your display logic - you're pushing your display logic into your business logic!
EasyBacklog makes backlog management simple
To "compartmentalize risk and failure" requires regulation, which is anathema to many free marketeers. And if regulation goes too far you get stagnation. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
IANAL, but it might be, if she is an exempt employee. Exempt employees are not subject to overtime, minimum wage, meal period, or rest period protections. I suppose the argument her boss would make is that as manager, she should hire and schedule more reliable employees to work those shifts.
Wrong. The UK and Ireland have never been part of the Schengen Area and have specific exemptions just for them in the Schengen Agreement.

Also, EU Directive 2004/38/EC is not the same as Schengen and unlike Schengen is virtually unimplemented in full in any country, especially in the UK.

Border control is a very politically contentious topic in the UK. So, changes and implementations that attempt to erode borders generally fail, whether upfront or in practice (even if it is illegal according to EU laws such as the directive above).
"A lot of my problems with IT departments would be solved if the IT folks recognized that people with degrees in computer engineering and computer science tend to be able to take care of their own machines"

But that's not true. I work as a developer or an admin depending on my mood and the money, I would not consider one able to do the job of the other even though I have done each with the same degree in hand.

The discipline of designing stable, maintainable systems & networks or writing code to requirements precisely and accessibly are distinct and often wildly different. Little of it comes with your degree.

That said, my current gig is quite good in that regard: "We support A, B and C. If you want to use X and Z you're on your own. Here are the guidelines on security and patching."
Sounds like we do, in fact, agree. The full title of the thesis is: "Truth Goggles: Automatic	Incorporation	of	Context	and Primary Sources to Enable Critical Media Consumption"

This tool won't tell you what to think; it will merely remind you to think.
To me this story looks a lot like Word War I and the Crimean War, to talk about other European tragedies: everyone saw the disaster coming, but everyone that could have made something to prevent it didn't do it because he/she thought that it was just too bad to happen and in the end sanity would magically prevail. I thing the tragedy will repeat itself.

It is possible that the common currency will crash and some countries will get out of the European Community. But the European Community will survive.

Remember, before the European Community, all the biggest wars in history either happened in Europe or were started by Europeans: Crusades, colonialism in Africa and Asia, genocide of Native Americans, Napoleonic wars, WWI and WWII, ...

After the European Community the only wars in Europe were outside of the Community and the only really big tragedy with European initiative (Stalin's big famine) was also outside of it.
b) and c) might wind up solved by reduced traffic jams, and d) assumes cars wouldn't change any once becoming autonomous.
What about doing the same thing, but fuzzing a few pixels from each edge to avoid pixel distance matching? You could even make the edges just plain black for a few pixels from each edge. The human eye would be able to complete the image (it would just look like it has black bars), but I'm guessing it would be enough to prevent a simple algorithmic solution.

Edit: This is essentially the same idea as the iron fence posted above.
It's possible, but difficult to predict. Back in 2008 Sequoia famously predicted startup capital would dry up, but it didn't come to pass. (http://venturebeat.com/2008/10/10/the-sequoia-rip-good-times...)

Of course, the rise of super angels probably played a large role in that.
The title ("SMTP and Sinatra") made me expect something written in Ruby. Also:

def subscribe(self, route=r'subscribe-(?P<name>[^@]*)@.*'):

No. No. No. No. No. No. No. Default arguments are not for specifying metadata about your functions. That's what decorators are for. And for the love of Guido, why are you accessing per-request information from instance variables? It seems to me that you would much rather be programming this in Ruby.
The faster something goes, the less turning radius it has, and the tighter your manufacturing tolerances gets.

It's more than likely that track designed for 200mph HSR will be completely incompatible with 400mph maglevs. Unless you want to cap the maglevs at 200mph. The maglev will easily fly off the rails trying to take a 200mph curve at 300mph.
k, cool. Let me know what you think!
What first point? How sovereign debt is different from corporate debt? Because it is different, and I explained why. It's commonly mentioned in articles on sovereign debt. Single example:

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/11/20/cds-conspir...

"Everybody knows that Greece can and should take some kind of tactical advantage of the fact that most of its debt has been issued under Greek domestic law."
Although there are some insanities with the IT situation at work, I have to say that I'm pretty pleased with one aspect: You can install your own OS, have admin, install whatever software you want, just fill out the appropriate exception form online. They just won't support it--and for computer scientists and computer engineers like the people in my group, that's perfect. Other groups, with other types of scientists or support staff, get a corporate image.

Now, there's some insanity with our network from time to time, but I deleted the big rant I wrote in favor of keeping the post positive about my employer.

If you undervalue your IT department, you won't be able to get good people to stay. If good people won't stay, you end up with the bad ones--their solution is always to reboot or reformat, they don't know how to actually make reasonable changes to the environment so they just maintain the status quo. There's no IE9 upgrade plan at all, because they already know how to support IE6 and aren't willing to even look at IE9. Now everyone else hates the IT department, and if any good IT employee shows up, he's either going to run screaming from the interview, or stick it out for a few months before realizing all of his co-workers are idiots.
Even large corps give their programmers admin on their own computers. No average or above programmer would work for a company where they had to request permission to install a text editor. That's simply unacceptable.
Photoshop Manipulations - The Hacker Factor Blog
I dont know why it happens, but I "resolved" it by rooting the device and downloading the app Root Explorer.
The Shocking Truth About the Crackdown on Occupy
And air travel is less efficient, noisier, and dependent on fossil fuels than gliding over a maglev track.
Sidedn.es • Riches Without The Fame
I don't know if it is legal, but I do know that it's quite common for managers of franchises to have to do this.
Electric cars don't reduce pollution

They most certainly do. Even the latest, most wonderfully advanced gasoline engines are positively filthy compared to a modern coal plant, which is positive filthy compared to a nuclear plant, which is positively filthy compared to a solar/wind/wave plant.
Lol, it's dogmatism like that which gives the Python community such a great reputation.

I was shooting for the most concise syntax I could get. Why Python and not Ruby? I wanted to use Python's standard smtpd library, and their great libraries for dealing with RFC2822 emails.

Oh, in regards to the instance variables. It uses a forking based paradigm to handle requests, so the instance variables are not maintained from request to request.
>Huh? Debt is so simple a four year old can understand it. You give me money now and I give you money later.

Except that the four year old would be wrong when it comes to fractional reserve banking. I'm trying to imagine how a four year old would understand "You give me a piece of paper promising to pay the money back, and as long as I haven't done it too much (based on the money I have), I create money out of thin air and balance it with your promise to repay."
> Traffic in L.A. is so bad during rush "hour" (which lasts several hours) that you can't travel by car faster than walking speed. It routinely takes 30+ minutes to travel 3 miles or so. Car is your only option in most locations.

Bicycles? Have you heard of'm?
That's not what I'm talking about. People were saying to avoid CS in the browser altogether.
The other benefit is that I don't have to own a train (although that would be quite awesome). Buying monthly Metrocards for a year will cost you about $1200, significantly less than car payments, gas, insurance payments, repair payments, ...