skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The generic "city" is not a very useful term here. How many people are there? There's a big difference between New York and Maza. What is the topography like? Is it sprawling like Phoenix? Or dense like Tokyo? How much density, population, and infrastructure is required to make a convenient and economical transit system? I'd wager far too much to displace cars in any meaningful way except in the largest cities.

Cars are used because they are versatile. Every other form of transport has far more narrow use cases.
I know MM personally, and although he's a bit quirky, he's not "evil" by a long shot (see grassroots.org).
I'd agree with Hong Kong and Thailand as food destinations. Don't focus on "regional" or "local" cuisine in those places though. Population density (and mix) along with food culture and infrastructure conspire to create multicultural food meccas. I'd probably rate Thai food #2 or #3 in Bangkok, with Japanese, Chinese or maybe Italian having an edge. Hong Kong is marginally more expensive than Bangkok but both offer excellent value. They've also both developed strong wine and beer cultures. I've been enjoying a wide variety of high value Bordeaux here in Bangkok. Both have growing supplies of Belgian and German beers as well. Go to Hong Kong for Belgian beer and mussels. Go to Bangkok for Italian or Japanese or even the steakhouses. Yes, you can also get really good Chinese and Thai in these places.
Seconding this. In senior year of university, the math requirements of the CS track went from second-grade arithmetic to being expected to have finished your math minor. It was quite the jarring shift.

If you want to program, you don't need to know much in the way of mathematics. If you want to program well, knowing advanced math will open up new possibilities for problem solving. If you want a CS degree, start taking math courses now.
I like the sentiments expressed in the post and hope that on my deathbed I will not regret "not having spent more time with my children".

I think, though, I would regret it more if on my deathbed I thought "My children did not get the opportunity to attend University because we could not afford it", or "If I had the money to send them to a better school, they may have had more opportunities".

I also would not like to be a burden on my children if I became sick because I did not have enough money saved to pay for medical care or whatever other care I need.

In my fifties, when there are redundancies, I don't want to be the one they say "while all the other workers are prepared to put in the hard yards, he's the one that always leaves at 5:00" or miss out on promotions because the others work longer hours than me.
The Readiness is All.
Another vote for Prompt here. Love it.
Does sitting = death?
I think it's important to note that although biological systems are still well out of our reach, chemical systems (using quantum chemical methods) is being done increasingly better, and we can learn a lot about various systems, ranging from graphene to organic semiconductors to metal-clusters in enzymes using computational methods. So one day, we'll slowly get there, and we shouldn't write it off. Though yes, the current state of the art is hopeless for cancer drug development--but the field is dynamically changing.
having recently moved from Texas to Silicon Valley, and originally being from Europe, I must say that California is a beautiful place to live.
But if I had kids I would strongly consider going back to Texas or some place else where I'd get proper housing for a fair price.

So I agree with at least part of this article. California is a suboptimal place for a young middle-class family.
Coding over SSH is a pain using crappy coffee shop wifi. Much easier to make a change, then push it up to the server via SFTP when you're done. Maybe I'm just anal retentive, but I can tolerate a bit of a lag when punching in compile commands, etc, but not when writing code. Instantaneous response is essential to flow!
First of all, California's economy is not going to be eclipsed by another state's any time soon. I know, the article doesn't explicitly talk GDP but hear me out...

2010 California GDP per capita $51,914
2010 Texas GDP per capita $45,940

2010 California GDP $1,936,400,000,000 (#1 in the nation, 13.34% of total US GDP)
2010 Texas GDP $1,207,432,000,000 (#2 in the nation, 7.95% of total US GDP)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_GDP

Although the exodus does signal a change, it's not going to affect California's economy as much as, say, Gov. Brown's policies. Perhaps the wsj author knows this? He might be attempting to bias Gov. Brown's policies with this posturing...

Secondly, I don't believe an exodus of the middle class means anything!

Take either the cynical view that they couldn't influence politics anyway.

Or take the generous view that they were happy with politics but couldn't afford to stay.

If the middle class gets up in arms about politics, you _hear_ about it. Admittedly, as a rule the middle class is pretty content. Choosing to move out-of-state is more about employment opportunities, life events, or even random whims before politics enters the equation (for the middle class; I wish I had a solid source to provide actual poll data on that).

Finally, rent prices in the Bay Area might be an important discussion to have. So, how about some concrete historical data, a google maps mashup, or even plain old advertising (i.e. come live in Atherton, our rent went down last year! Note: I don't actually live in Atherton, that's a joke.)

If your job is in Manhattan Beach, the same data for that area is probably available, but the LA and Bay Area housing economies are pretty much independent.
I think there's a big difference between 30-40 domains not being used for an honest reason, and 15,000 domains purchased for the specific purpose of reselling them at a higher price. And that's only 15,000 bought over a two-day period. How many does he own in total?

Given the numbers here, I'd say that any random parked domain you find is statistically far more likely to belong to a domain squatter than a legitimate "I have this crazy idea that I'm not sure if it'll take off" entrepreneur.
Automated hover taxis would be nice. And Evacuated Tube Transport to replace trains and planes.
Leaving out all politics, over the 10 years I've lived here about half of my friends who have had kids left the state.

Specifically because they could not afford owning a comfortable home here.

It's a very real phenomenon.
Property values aren't set by the Government; they're driven by -- surprise -- supply and demand.

This isn't really true in the case of California real estate, because the government restricts supply through height limitations. See Edward Glaeser's The Triumph of the City and Matt Yglesias's The Rent is Too Damn High for deeper discussions of the issue.
I think the robo-car is the self cleaning kitchen of the 2010's. When your ML algorithm makes an error, it won't just be a drop in some abstract accuracy measurement -- someone will die. This is a hell of a lot of liability to take on. Google's self-driving car is a promo stunt. You would need a lot of infrastructure for it to be safe -- and with that infrastructure will come loss of the "freedom" you describe -- e.g. It'll be a kind of train.

Not like you have that freedom now. Yeah, maybe in some rural area compared to hoofing it for 30 miles :-), but we're not talking about that -- you'll still use cars there. It's not true in suburbia. That's why we have malls and big box stores with huge parking lots built next to highways. You are unnaturally constrained to the highways and roads that have been built -- the freedom is illusory.

Speed. Well, you're attempting to compare Caltrain to the alternatives. In no way does Caltrain compare to Metro north or NJTransit -- the reason people choose to drive is not because cars are intrinsically faster in those areas, but because the mass transit in the bay area sucks. It's like saying in 1997 that "people have chosen rationally" not to use a phone as a web browser. Yes, they have, very rationally in fact, but it says nothing about the intrinsic ability of a phone-like device to be a web browser.

Efficiency is a red herring. Even the post you linked to is inconclusive in that regard. If you step out of the box and consider that the same improvements to cars could be made to buses or trains, then apply the economy of scale a massive investment in transit would mean -- it comes out a little differently. In the same post, there is a comparison to transit in other countries -- the comparison gets a little weak at that point.
How you should drink coke like a hacker
Very carefully selected workers managing themselves. Not just any workers.
fastmail's non-free service, maybe? I got it a very long time ago, mainly for the .in email address. It's been no-frills, fast, and (mostly) reliable. I'm still not sure I'd recommend it to a gmail user, but its been a good email account to have.
I was excited to see this and find some damn good content (tm) I contributed to stackoverflow that was deleted by the over-exuberant moderators there. Please stackoverflow moderators, you're killing a great site. Stop. Just stop.
I don't think people want to hate Google; I just think they're attracted by the controversy. It's like the faster-than-light neutrinos. People weren't interested because they hate Einstein, but because it's some apparently new information that contradicts what they previously thought to be true.
Great stuff. :D
Doesn't seem huge. Most people pay for bandwidth. Standard web DOS attacks cost money too. Same thing with linking to S3. The fix is as it's always been, email your provider and explain the situation. Most likely they'll revert your usage. Presumably if it becomes a big problem they'll set up something like rate limiting by IP.
What a bunch of self-absorbed bullshit.

When you're rich, you can obsess over this sort of nonsense. The rest of us have lives to lead, pg.

Choose happiness? Did George Washington choose happiness? Did Oppenheimer or von Neumann choose happiness? Or Stanley Kubrick? Or Faulkner? How about Steve Jobs or Ken Thompson? Or Bill Gates or Linus Torvalds? Or Elon Musk?

Why not choose obsession? Why not choose dedication, and commitment?

I say choose fulfillment.

Saying "choose happiness" is like saying, "I've built this great foundation for a magnificent building, but I don't feel like building it. I'll just sort of hang out and let people admire this great foundation." Of course you need to be happy to achieve anything. Unhappy people do not get very far in life, same way buildings with no foundation do not stand for very long.
yup. The quality, size and price of housing here is so far the biggest shock to me. Basically Texas would give you a free 2000sqf house if you are a dual income household (just by saving the income tax and rent difference)
This is an article from 2010 and the project is considered no longer active: https://mozillalabs.com/en-US/chromeless/
Net migration includes immigration (legal and illegal). So no they are not trying to explain net migration, as their data apparently excludes immigration (although one cannot say for sure, they are very vague and misleading about what the data says).

They have a very specific metric: "net migration to/from other states," and even for that I am not sure their data is correct.

Even if it is true, there is a much more logical explanation. Note that California is the most populous state in the nation, and is surrounded by many much less populous states. There is always a natural tendency for some people to go from populated areas to less populated areas. This is why America got settled in the first place for Pete's sake. Were the initial 13 colonies dysfunctional? No, but they got crowded and people started looking for opportunities elsewhere.

Naturally with higher population densities, real estate and certain other resources will be more expensive. Naturally, people that prefer to have more space will look for places where those things are cheaper. So there is a perfectly logical reason why 'some' people will tend to leave higher density states, not because they are dysfunctional but because they are higher density.

And since the WSJ statistics apparently include only 'some' people, than that is a much more logical explanation than assuming all kinds of dysfunctions.
Why the short url ? It points to http://discovercircle.com if anyone is curious.
We haven't read the late applications yet.
I don't see how that applies here? That communism doesn't work well or is inherently unfair doesn't generalize into the idea that the less communistic a society is, the better. In general, I think Rand is overly reductionistic and shouldn't constitute a significant portion of anyone's worldview.
This is damn insane.
Cool stuff.
I'm so disconnected from Flash work now, that it's easy to almost forget about the hundreds and hundreds of hours I spent doing it. But 10 or 12 years ago it was a really exciting area, and Hillman Curtis was incredibly inspiring. His stuff and Joshua Davis' Praystation were on another level. He left a real mark. And he had the courage to walk away for something new when he needed to. Sorry to hear about this.
When running, you are getting faster in the breaks in between running sessions.
Running all the time leads to degeneration.

So if you want to excel, work hard and make enough breaks.
I'm a steak lover, and reading about mechanically separated meat makes me throw up in my mouth a little.
Flying cars must happen eventually, but only long after driverless cars have become the norm.
Outlook has conversation view as well, and Microsoft Lync (formerly Office Communicator) integrates the rest of the feature set (yes you're vendor-locked, but you are with GMail too). In my opinion GMail executes better on most of these features, but they're not the only ones to offer them.
Back in my days at Andersen Consulting, annual reviews were done by getting everyone at manager or higher level to assess everyone they had worked with over the preceding year and the nature and duration of the working relationship. This weighted your ranking. Within seniority levels, every person's scores were then calculated, sorted, and then assigned to one of five bands which determined raises.

This sounds a lot like stack ranking except it was top down. This was, by far, the best system I have ever seen for handling a difficult and often unpleasant process, and I think making it work across levels versus top down would only improve it. Incidentally, I only found out about this process once I made manager -- but I had consistently been in the top band for my entire time at AC despite having a senior colleague trying to screw me.
That's a terrible idea. People would just create fake purposes for the websites.. and then who would be responsible to decide if a purpose is legitimate or not?
Who lobbied for those limitation and similar ones though? I'm guessing that's where he's going - the businesses that stand to lose is such high-density, supply increasing designs were built.
a·mor·al ( -môr l, -m r -). adj. 1. Not admitting of moral distinctions or judgments; neither moral nor immoral
I'm excited about this, but there really needs to be societal consideration here. While I'm all for eating whatever tastes good, many of my meat-eating friends are grossed out even when they think about how regular meat is procured. I don't want to think how they'll react to test tube meat.

Then again, the next generation won't know anything else.
well, experience is just data and so its use in solving problems requires its input to an algorithm, which in this case resides in wetware. In other words, i suppose the value of experience depends entirely on the person who possess it.

We need to hire a couple programmer/analyst. No threshold experience level was required, because we want the best talent. After interviewing a dozen or so candidates, it occurred to me that someone with average intellectual horsepower, never seemed to mine the maximum value from the experience that they had. Why?

Either (i) they seemed to just store their experiences as a look-up table and then access it as a proxy for genuine creative thinking ("sure, i've seen that problem before, and we solved it this way ...." Granted, sometimes this expedient is just what you need, but it's undesirable if one's cognitive repertoire is limited in this way; or (ii) they failed to abstract that experience into broadly applicable principles. (I suspect this is the failure that is responsible when someone says "he/she has does not have five years of experience, they have one year of experience, five times." Without abstraction, unless your memory/recall is essentially perfect, it's difficult to actually use your experience to gain leverage over a new problem.
I tried snatching up newmogul.com (it was a developed community like HN for business news at one point) when it expired, but was beat to the punch, presumably by someone like this guy (as it currently seems to have some fake blog parked on it now).

The original owner and operator of New Mogul just shut the site down out of the blue, and I got a replacement site setup at http://forlue.com and wanted to direct NM to forlue.

I sure miss NM.
What I've found lacking on the iPad is apps that are suitable for structured, long-form writing similar to things like LyX. I can write Markdown or LaTeX by hand in a text editor but much prefer a graphical environment, and none of the available word processing apps support styles, cross-references, or any of the other things I need for academic writing.

I've actually been working on an app which supports these features for the past few months and hope to release soon. It's at the point where I'm looking for some feedback on UI & functionality from anyone who does a lot of academic or technical writing. If you're interested, drop me a line (kellypmk@gmail.com).
Having an org chart hierarchy doesn't prevent natural hierarchies that don't match it from forming, and now you have two problems.

I suspect it doesn't work perfectly, but what does?
Scriptable favicons can be useful and unobtrusive when used judiciously. For example, adding a small "1" in a red circle when a new message arrives. Sure, you could just replace the favicon with another image that has the number hard-coded into it, but that's a bit clunky and you'd need to prepare several different images.
Angela Lansbury Relaxing
$15 Linux CPU module
very limited money

B) Hack on existing open source projects to increase my knowledge of working on large & complex code bases (significant time cost buy little money cost).

C) Work on my own projects in the hope that I can build something cool that will get me recognition in some way.
Need help finding a Hacker News post.
A few years ago a URL was posted to HN which linked to a page containing several web page layout examples with each example followed by real-world usage examples. It was notable in my mind because it covered much more than the standard n-column, grid, n-boxes, and gallery layouts my current web searches are turning up (I am fairly certain the title of the article was not the "{number} Ways to ..." or "{number} Rock Solid ..." blog spam my searches have turned up so far).

Does the above description prompt anyone's memory?

Or, can someone please reply with a link to a similar encyclopedia of website layouts?
RIP.

This was posted a few days ago and didn't get any votes.. glad it finally made it.
As someone who obsesses over API design, it is interesting for me to reflect on why I don't consider APIs copyrightable, even though I have spent so much effort and creativity designing them.

The issue makes the most sense to me when I think of APIs as communications protocols. Indeed APIs for remote services literally are communications protocols. But even for the in-process case an API is the means by which two decoupled pieces of code communicate.

In this sense, APIs aren't that different from languages themselves. If you get really abstract, you could think of LISP as nothing but S-expression syntax and everything else (including define, lambda, etc) as an API.

Languages themselves aren't copyrightable, even thought things you can say in a language are. Languages like Lojban certainly had a lot of creative design go into them, but that alone doesn't make them copyrightable.

So even though I think you can make a pretty convincing philosophical argument for why APIs shouldn't be copyrightable, the critical deciding factor to me in is a practical one. Allowing APIs to be copyrightable would be a huge and unwarranted advantage to incumbents at the expense of innovation and disruptive technology. Users of any API would be locked in to one particular provider of that API.

The ability to swap out one component for another is a fundamental tool for software engineers, and it's a fantastically pro-competitive check that keeps people honest. If your API provider BigCo raises their prices and no one else is allowed to compete with them because their API is copyrighted, how is that good for anyone except BigCo? In particular, someone else may have developed a superior way of implementing the API; allowing them to do so could help move the entire industry forward. Protecting BigCo from this disruption gives them no incentive to move their own tech forward; they can continue to coast on the vendor lock-in of their customers. We're not talking about letting others copy their product, but rather allowing others to speak the same language that everyone is currently speaking to BigCo.

I agree with Joshua Bloch's sentiment that API design is "tough" and "a noble and rewarding craft," but I don't think either of these imply legally-protected status. I think it would be terrible for the industry if the judge ruled that APIs are copyrightable.
There are two trains of thought here that I think are important to differentiate, there's the idea of developing software for yourself, and the idea of developing software for others with the expectation that they pay you.

When developing software for yourself it's very important that if push comes to shove that you can hack the OS to do whatever the hardware is capable of. Yes, you can still make Facebook for Android but Photoshop won't be coming to the platform with out a paying userbase, this is the same reason you don't find Photoshop on Linux.

When developing software for others it's very important that there is a userbase and that the userbase pays for software. It doesn't matter if the reason that few buy software on Android is because of fixable UX issues with the marketplace, I don't know how much of the UX issues are still relevant.

Another important factor is why Google might be dumping android (if they are at all), if it's because of patents it's unlikely that Amazon or anyone else will touch it. If Kindle is the only userbase left then it might not make a whole lot of sense for developers to sink time and money into the platform.

Win Mo will pose a threat to Android and may cause them to dump it if it becomes the alternative to iOS. There are a whole bunch of ifs in the article and honestly I think it's unlikely that Google will dump Android, but the key to it all is how much money developers can make from the platform.

Android isn't going to be very viable as a commericial dev platform if hardware manufacturers aren't producing phones that come pre-installed with Android.
How has that been made clear at all? I've only seen one link to an actual question here, and that one wasn't deleted, but locked (by me) to prevent it from being deleted. Raise your standard of proof.
Is this rangecheck() function that we're debating critical to the Android platform? Is that the feature that made it so popular? Clearly not, or Oracle would have made smartphones already. I'm curious as to how many different ways a range check function can be written in Java. Can we reasonably expect Bloch to re-implement his own code in a slightly different way? Should Google have diff'd Android source against Java source? What does Open Source mean to you?