skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First, you're making an argument I didn't make. I didn't say, "the GOP thinks Amtrak is bad because it is subsidized more than roads" (though clearly some do think that, like the Cato libertarians). I said "the GOP thinks Amtrak is bad because it operates on the brink of insolvency mitigated by direct cash subsidies".

Secondly, go read the actual source cited by that Economist blog post. It's another blog post:

http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/12208/funding-amtra...

The cost breakdown in this blog post is ad hoc, and the biggest "wins" for Amtrak come from parking and "resource consumption".

Parking is taxed, not directly subsidized. The blog post dips into studies that (rightly) excoriate free parking, and scales the external cost of free parking across all parking, thus conflating the total cost of driving with the subsidized cost of driving.

For "resource consumption", the blogger found a study that attributed the entire cost of our military presence in the gulf to oil prices, simply averaging the military budget across oil prices per barrel.

This just isn't credible.

I am not anti-Amtrak, but I am anti-oversimplified-arguments and anti-demonizing-viewpoints. A counterpoint from Cato, which I also do not buy outright:

http://www.cato.org/pubs/bp/bp107.pdf
@hkarthik I understand getting trapped in the ecosystem. That is a choice I would have to make if I am going into .NET.

By the wall probably it is the Visual studio IDE that is making the learning process easier for me. Probably that is what it is.
In that case you might also find this one of the greatest auto designs of all time:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citroën_2CV

I'd love to create a modern electric conversion of a 2cv, but while I don't hate cars, I don't want to become that much of a car guy.
2011 in books
LA has more public transit than most people think; 1.4 million boardings per day ain't nothing to sneeze at.

http://www.metro.net/news/pages/ridership-statistics/
I live on the west coast. Amtrak is so lame here it takes 12 hours to take the train from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and there's only one each day. It's an amusement park ride for train buffs instead of a way to travel.

Why am I paying for Amtrak? Outside a very small area on the east coast, it's useless. Either expand it into a true national rail system or get rid of it.
I'm 17, and drive a manual. My parents thought I was crazy when I said I wanted to only drive manual, and I've noticed that at my school my vehicle is one of probably 5 cars (out of >100) in our lot that's a stick. When I ask friends why they don't drive stick, they say they simply don't want to deal with the hassle of it. Enthusiasts are few and far between…
Is this really the case? Most non-technical people I talk to don't seem to care about security or maintenance, unless it prevents them from performing their daily computer-activities.
I like the sentiment but don't feel like some of this is realistic. I get how you can feel awful after being paid a lot of money and give litte in return.

But here's the thing - when you don't have money to begin with its hard to quit a job or refuse a job even if you know deep down its wrong. Most people don't have the luxury of being able to listen to their conscience without ending up in the poor house. It's only after you've made enough money to have attained stability (or the oh so rare real savings) that you can afford to do what's right and follow your heart.

All of us want to make the world better but most of us can't afford that luxury. Money in and of itself can't buy happiness but it can buy you time and tools to do the right thing. I'm glad the author got out of there and is doing what makes him happy but I wonder if he'd be doing those things if he hadn't worked for the bank.
I'm not arguing with anyone. I just don't think Congressman "have a valid point regarding Amtrak" when they complain about a problem they're largely responsible for. Don't you agree? Or do you think they do "have a valid point regarding Amtrak"?
And Chicago! Come on, Thomas, how could you forget Chicago?
This is another poor basis for public tax policy - the classic "I don't use it so I don't want to pay for it."

First - part of living in a society is paying for things that others use that you may not, but which improves society for all.

Second - I live in Philadelphia and rarely use roads, and yet my tax dollars to the government of Pennsylvania are used, in combination with gas tax proceeds, to repair roads that others drive on, and that I don't directly benefit from. That's the price of living in a society, and I support it.
The bit on wealth management is worth reading, since certain banks' wealth management divisions do contact startup founders to try and drum up future business.
That and would he be able to do what he's in now if he didn't make all that money first.
I think this list is super cool, but I think it'd actually be pretty expensive to live like this.
The overall cost of car ownership and driving (gas, insurance, maintenance/repairs, YOUR TIME to wash/re-fuel/maintain your car, parking fees, stress, environmental factors that not many seem to care about) vs. some of those same factors in public transit do it for me.

A bike is also a small fraction of the cost of a car, and great for pretty much everything if you live in a city. I'm moving to SF in a few months and I'll only take a job within a few miles of where I'll be living (SOMA area) because I'd like to commute via bike year-round (and ideally telecommute at least some of the time.)

Really, with how much "work from outside the office" tech we have, it's crazy to me that millions of Americans are risking their lives every day /just to get to work/. Can we stop this unnecessary, costly, dangerous, polluting madness please?
I agree with you. All the evidence shows that the lack of young people driving is economic. All Americans are driving less right now.
You also have to deal with the segment of the homeless population that seeks shelter on the trains, and the ones that aggressively panhandle. I have rarely ridden a CTA train without being accosted with demands for money from people who "just got out of prison and am trying to get on the right path" etc.
May 2012 be a decided step further away from the Lost Decade, in more than time.
I tried to learn to drive on a manual transmission. My mom has always driven manual so it made sense since that was the car available to me at the time. I hated it though. I'm sure it's fun if you're already a driver, but after years and years of riding my bicycle and becoming accustomed to dealing with traffic, pedestrians, etc at the speed of a bicycle, driving was a huge mental shift for me. The fact that I also had to worry about the transmission and that the car would violently let me know that I was doing it wrong turned it into a nightmare. Driving an automatic meant that I could focus completely on the road and not killing myself or anyone else.

An interesting analogy that I thought of at the time was manual memory management. Stalling the car felt an awful lot like throwing a seg fault. I haven't followed the analogy very far so it might break down, but it's certainly true that in the right hands (race car drivers, kernel programmers?), C and stick shifts can be wielded with devastating effect.

I never actually finished learning to drive though, as I live in NYC now, so YMMV (literally).
I'm sorry for the cliched phrasing, but doesn't that mean the creepy stalkers have won?
I completely agree. I own a 12yo car which is good enough for buying groceries with, occasionally, and use public transportation for everything else. I'd love a fancy car, but I will never finance something that's not a real necessity. I'd much rather sleep well at night, than have to pay off debt for the next decade.
An idea for 2012 - client-side data and time flow visualization
I was looking for good javascript frameworks that do data visualization. I found couple really good ones: Raphael + g.Raphael, D3, and processing-js. But what really strikes me that we don't have a good idea how to visualize flow of Time and Data. An example of such flow diagram was published by google:

http://analytics.blogspot.com/2011/10/introducing-flow-visualization.html

But I haven't seen any other project that would propose a flow visualization that would be as clear and uncluttered as google analytics is.

EDIT: the graph is called "alluvial diagrams" - but I'm still hungry for more (thanks to swanson)
Sound reactive Shutter Shades
; initialize

CALL -151
1000:BA 8A A8 49 80 AA 9A A9 2 48 A9 FF 48 BA 86 6 98 AA 9A A6 6 A9 30 85 6 A9 C0 85 7 A0 0 0 N 1000G

; six bytes!

300:9A B1 6 4C ED FD
300G
Yeap. I listen to KRTU all the time, since there aren't any decent Jazz radios around here.
The fact that he left out the greatest city in the US doesn't improve his credibility either. ;)
> Cars under $50K today are mostly boring.

I too lament that fact, but there are a few non-boring cars under $30k. The Subaru WRX, Mazda Miata and (soon) the Toyota GT-86/Subaru BRZ strike me as not boring, but it seems to me that the market for these cars has shrunk. People actually seem to want boring cars now.
I think this, or a similar implementation at any rate, was previously posted on HN. It's certainly a good idea, and I think that the more popular crypto libraries (I'm looking at you, OpenSSL) would do well to consider implementing something similar.

The key point being that (and this was my biggest concern), it is fully compatible with AES-NI, the Intel's hardware-accelerated AES instruction set. According to TFA, with AES-NI there is no performance penalty for keeping the AES keys stored in registers and out of the RAM. What's not to like?
Hooray for floating islands! (seriously, I love that these exist in M(ine|ein)craft. It makes the world a lot more interesting)

Very CPU heavy. For those wondering, it does work, it just takes a while for anything to appear.
There's plenty of cases where transit beats driving, especially during rushhour, though admittedly there are many more where it doesn't. For example, getting from Midtown Atlanta to the airport during rushhour takes about 40-45 minutes driving, or 30 minutes by metro. The 20-minute light-rail trip from downtown LA to Pasadena can also easily take 2x as long by car. And the 30-minute Pacific Surfliner trip from downtown LA to Orange County beats even the off-peak driving times on I-5, easily crushing the rushhour trip times.

The variance is also typically less; I've gotten stuck in 2-hour commutes home due to a freeway accident much more often than I've been waylaid for over an hour by a train delays, though that probably varies based on the freeway and transit system.
Not if they're not stalking her..
If alternatives to wealth management firms are interesting to you, you might like Burton Malkiel's "A Random Walk Down Wall Street".

http://www.amazon.com/Random-Walk-Down-Wall-Street/dp/039332...
Murtza this is not a shot at you - congrats on your change of heart I applaud it. I do hope though that the small wave of ex-Wall St. moving towards startups as they have become trendy will stick things out when the music stops and not go back to the street when money calls. (The music will stop or at least slow down at some unknown time.) Never worked in finance but I'd imagine it must be 'good money' but 'bad everything else'.
I'm not saying those are the only great cities in America. But I'm considering it on an international scale, considering good public transit, and city planning. (I've never been to, or read much, about Seattle, so I can't comment on that, and same with Detroit, but both are relatively small cities on an international scale in terms of population, and/or general political/cultural influence)

I'm talking about well designed cities. San Diego is awesome, but it's kind of an urban sprawl, not well planned. But any infrastructure would be great in that climate, right? Cool laid back culture in San Diego, but how would the city's deign, aesthetic, beauty, and public infrastructure hold up on an international level? Maybe really well, but it could be so much better. (And don't get me wrong, I love SD, and their beaches)

Austin is really cool, but again, is also a classic example of a good city gone wrong with suburbs. Many American developers, and American's just don't understand the purpose of a grid system. In Austin there is 'downtown', but where are the people living there. Downtown in Austin seems to merely represent the 'soul' of the city, while the majority of the 'residents' live in poorly planned suburbs with 1.5 Walmarts, and 3 starbucks for every 5 miles you drive in your SUV. So Austin is not a great city in my book, because of it's poor surrounding suburb infrastructure, and 'fo' downtown. Austin downtown acts more of an amusement park, than an actual great city.

But that does not mean Austin is not 'great', it's just not a 'great city' on an international scale, in terms of public infrastructure and the such. But relative to other American cities, it's cool, but it's be strangled by the surrounding suburbs.

I live in Atlanta, actual Atlanta, not a suburb. And it's an example of a city infrastructure gone horribly wrong. Little public design going on in Atlanta, which is a shame, because there is so much potential, like many American cities. I think Georgia needs to rethink how we tax, residential tax makes no sense to me. Living in another area from where you work, is a strange concept. I think we should take away the tax incentives for living in the suburbs, as I find them morally wrong in the first place.
You're answering a resource allocation argument with a moral argument. Non sequitur. If you reject the premise that we should allocate resources to the modes of transport that move the most people at the least expense including external costs, you're opting out of the whole debate.

Also, unlike most of Amtrak, you benefit directly from Penn's roads even when you don't use them yourself; for instance, virtually everything you eat is brought to you over them.
Absolutely. My comment was a little tongue-in-cheek - That's not to take away from everything fogus (and many like him) have accomplished.

It's just that after reading a post like that, it makes me think that I need a little bit more focus. I get attracted to new shiny things, but I still have a day job - which means that outside of shifting contexts a lot, I also shift my focus a lot.

A post like this makes me think that perhaps I need to dedicate a considerable amount of time to learning something new (Clojure in my case) and sticking with it.

And to answer your question, I did accomplish quite a lot this year (in my own little way). And I did enjoy it. Thank you.
>> I'm pretty optimally situated to take advantage of public transit.

I don't doubt that public transit is the worse choice for you, but I wanted to comment on an attitude this line reminds me of. People expect that public transportation will, when it "works," be better than having their own vehicle. If driving to a destination is faster and more pleasant, then the system has failed.

In general, there are two problems with this. First, the system was not designed for your trip - your car is. You car will (almost) always be better than any general purpose transport system. The measure of a transport system is how many places you can get to in an acceptable time frame with acceptable reliability. Obviously, as reliability increases and the time frame shrinks, the system improves. Think about the cost of your vehicle (both up front and continuing) and multiply that by the population of your city. We pay quite a lot for the quality afforded by a private vehicle.

Second, I think that many people judge trips from a point of view that's heavily conditioned by experiences in private vehicles. I like taking the subway to work because it lets me read for 25-30 minutes. I like it because I don't have to pay attention and can safely think about other things while I'm traveling. Many people aren't used to the different texture of traveling with a crowd of strangers, and I think that effects their assessments of the overall system.
And the answer to that is, probably not. But it's one of the best we know currently and until a compelling replacement comes along, it'll be used. ^_^
Facing the elevator the wrong way aka The Asch Experiment
No, you're not in the minority. I think the majority of Americans don't actually like driving. They might see the car as a status symbol, or as freedom or as necessary. They might prefer to be a driver than a passenger due to issues of power, control or trust but few actually get much out of the act of driving.

I love driving a good sports car with a manual transmission. I'm the minority, not you.
And notably, in the last 15 years, they got a fairly effective rail back up up and running (the MTA rails) as well as Metrolink.

I am surprised that Atlanta is on the list. In terms of public transit, it is not only abysmal, it seems that the current GA legislature is going out of their way to kill it.
A transcript would be nice! But I doubt there's one out there; it took a lot of trawling to find a mirror of the podcast in the first place, unfortunately.
I would love to know where/when/how you gave all that misbegotten money away?
haha, this is interesting because I feel like I'm much more paranoid now that I'm pretty deep into security. I run a ton of Firefox privacy extensions and it still freaks me out.

For the curious:
- AdBlock+, because public Wi-Fi is slow and I don't like using more bandwidth than necessary
- NoScript in "allow global" mode (still catches some XSS and other nastiness)
- RequestPolicy (like noscript but for cross-site requests; also great for only looking at text as most big sites now host CSS/JS/images on a CDN)
- Priv3 (blocks most opt-in social media integration while still letting it function if you want)
- Ghostery (blocks tracking cookies/pixels/other methods)
- Certificate Patrol (alerts you to any changes to SSL certs on sites -- it's surprising how often many sites change SSL up. Protects you from spoofing if you pay attention)
- HTTPS Everywhere
- MAFIAAFire (Gee! No Evil! to un-filter Google autocomplete, Pirate Bay Dancing, and Redirector to circumvent Department of Homeland Security DNS hijacking)
- Header Spy because I do lots of debugging web apps and it lets me quickly robtex a server.
- Wappalyzer to see what CMS or common software the site is running on

I'm pretty tinfoil'd up and still paranoid.
I saw the headline on this article and thought "Oh my god, that's such an awesome idea." Great example of one of those "So obvious, why didn't I think of that?" ideas.

I was reading through the site and really liked it. I'm not sure if I'm the exact target market, but I really liked what I saw. I was about to back out when I saw your nightly email thing, which is what convinced me to sign up (can't wait for my invite!).

Great idea, can't wait to try it out.
Wow, I don't read nearly as much. How much time daily does it take to read 41 books in a year?

The best book I read this year was also on your list: Where Good Ideas Come From
Actually, its a myth that its a myth that public transport is cheaper (see http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08111140802369820)

Once the massive externalities of private motor and road subsidies are accounted for, private motor is much more expensive per km/mi travelled than public transport (and obviously orders of magnitude more than bike)

In Sydney, AU for example driving costs $0.86/passengerKm while trains are only $0.48 (http://melbourneurbanist.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/glazebr...)

If motorists had to pay the true cost of the service, everyone would be riding bikes.
Secondly, go read the actual source cited by that Economist blog post. It's another blog post:

Yes - I'm quite aware of the original source, I went and found the Economist piece after finding the GreaterGreatWashington post, because I felt it added more interesting reading and discussion.

For "resource consumption", the blogger found a study that attributed the entire cost of our military presence in the gulf to oil prices, simply averaging the military budget across oil prices per barrel.

We are there as part of the Carter Doctrine, which states that our security depends on access to cheap oil. This is not just dug up by a pro-Amtrak blog post to make a point. This is a stated national policy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carter_Doctrine

I am not anti-Amtrak, but I am anti-oversimplified-arguments and anti-demonizing-viewpoints. A counterpoint from Cato, which I also do not buy outright

Agreed. My hat goes off to you for the Cato link, even though they drive me up the wall.

Bonus link "Help Passenger Rail by Privatizing Amtrak - Cato Institute" - http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa419.pdf
I think they have a valid point regarding Amtrak.

I think they have a valid point even if you narrow the whole thing down to the Acela. I do not have a hard time believing that the Northeast Rail Corridor is less cost-effective than air.

I'm pretty sure they have a valid point when you consider Amtrak nationwide.

I do not think that their point is dispositive. The Acela can be inefficient and still worth retaining and (as I've argued elsewhere here) extended.

But I object to the notion that they have no valid argument at all.
revised edition: http://www.amazon.com/Random-Walk-Down-Wall-Street/dp/039333...
Eh, I don't know how big of a selling point Youtube would be. For vloggers, the journal-like content is IN the video and you'd have no way of getting to that. Having just a title and timestamp wouldn't be that interesting in book form.
America’s top export in 2011 was . . . fuel?
I disagree about Atlanta. Atlanta does not have a well-developed rail. I should know - I live there. :)
My take right now is that even if you accept the idea that we should cost whole Iraq war in terms of price-per-mile (which I think is crazy but will stipulate), the parking cost he's cited is simply erroneous, and when you lose it, his blog post says that rail is more expensive than car.
My reading is still fairly undisciplined. I am trying to get up earlier in the mornings to read before work, but it's challenging. Reading Gotham took at least six weeks whereas other books I blew through in a day. My goal is to get up to a book a week, we'll see how that goes :)
AT&T CTO (ex-Silicon Valley):  Seek results, not credit or praise
I would argue that is an indirect beneift - the fact that my food arrives fresh and to my grocer. When I said direct benefit, I meant more along the lines of driving my car on those roads, which I do rarely. Still, excellent point.
Less than 10% of cars in America are stick shift now[0]. I've also read studies that claim they are less than 5%.

I took my car to Grease Monkey to get the oil changed and I had to drive it into and out of the bay, because no worker there knew how to drive a stick.

It also very much saddens me that when it's time to get a new car, I may be forced to not get a stick because so many models simply don't come in a manual now.

[0] http://autos.aol.com/article/stick-shift-love-affair/
Nobody ever said hackers were UI geniuses. Also,you have to know your community. For this community, the things you mention works.
Oh. Please. You must either be an overly sensitive person or a fiction writer. Your description is a little rich in the drama department.
The bias shield