skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That is a great question, I wish I could reasonably answer it. I'm a big fan of rail, and while San Jose was celebrating their first 4 miles of light rail (in just 10 years from the start of the project!) I was looking that the marker in the Sacramento Rail museum (recommended) commemorating the laying of 10 miles of the Union Pacific rail line in one day.

Part of it is that some folks really hate rail, so much so that they will continually sue anyone who is working to build it. They will argue wildlife endangerment, habitat destruction, cancer risk, suicide risk, traffic risk, earthquake/disaster risk, global epidemic risk, job preservation/creation/destruction risk, you name it. Anything to get back in court and have a judge temporarily suspend work. Because you hire someone to work on a project, and they can't because of some court order, you still have to pay them. So what happens is these projects have 'burn rates' (which is the cost of renting equipment (or depreciating it if you own it) and labor and materials (some of which degrade over time if not used)) and then you have 'able to work' days. Actual work days might be 90 for a mile of track, but time actually passed is like a year. So the other 275 days people sat on their hands while expensive lawyers argued to get work restarted.

Its one of the things I bring up at town hall meetings with politicians. The tax payer, and the 'NIMBY' [1] folks, fight a very asymmetric kind of warfare. No court challenges until funds are committed, and then six. You need look no further than the maneuvering around the California High Speed Rail project to see it play out in all of its ugliness.

[1] NIMBY -acronym Not In My Back Yard for people who are opposed to any new infrastructure near where they live.
Muting the first string is natural, trying not to mute it and fret it correctly is what makes it hard to play. It's vastly easier to just play the triad on the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th strings with the first 3 fingers; forget the bar. And if it sounds weak, turn up the volume or strum harder. :)
Almost all big, gronky, shipped software looks like that in places, especially if it relies heavily on external libs or services.

At least the swearing is honest.
Gandhi and some other like Abraham Lincoln wont ever declare war if they are pleased. For all other leaders you have to go to the "friendly" relationship status. The exception is Catherine the Great of Russia. That bitch is the only one who can be bribed into war even if she is friendly with the victim.
It has nothing to do with calculus, or math at all.

My natural reaction to the bat and ball problem was to parse the problem statement verbally and search for a plausible answer among the tokens. The algorithm retrieved "USD$1", and then a second background process took over and said "wait, that sounds a little bit too right". It might have taken me full 5 seconds before I realizes I had to switch to math_mode!!!
It begs of a cost-study, I mean, I'd gladly pay 4x the current cost of an economy flight from NYC->London if I could take a train of equal comfort that only took an hour or two.
Is this why Apple hasn't approved my Gift Card Reminder App?
Sweet. Now accepting pull requests :)

Interesting. We haven't hit that issue yet.

Hmmm. We also haven't had any issues with feedback affecting our outgoing messages. Yeah we just check for messages from the feedback socket after sending a notification (as Apple's guide recommends) but we're not doing anything fancy like waiting for a response. Sounds cool though.
I'd consider power-chords as bolstered single notes rather than actual chords. I'm not sure why people are repeating that 80s music was simple. It was a time when synthesizers were becoming more attainable and there was a lot of experimenting on that front. I feel we're going through a similar technical period with computers handling various functions on stage, now.
In London Apple Maps on iOS 6 beta are nowhere near beta level. From my Twitter feed today, many including screenshots:

- Streets are shown as numbers, American style. 'A405' rather than Old Kent Rd. Nobody in the UK uses these numbers for directions, or knows what the numbers are beyond 2 or 3 main highways. Nobody will ever say A405 in conversation. The numbers are useless, and the names aren't shown.

- No tube stations are shown

- The water is missing from parts of the Thames

- Searching for 'Bank Tube' takes you to Bank, Azerbaijan.
Tim Cook confirms updated Mac Pro coming in 2013
Your analysis is overly dismissive of genres that you presumably don't like. Simplistic pop songs aren't a new phenomenon; they were just as present in the 60s as they are now. We just don't listen to them anymore as they haven't stood the test of time. This was abundantly evident last weekend when I went through a stack of about 100 45s from the 60s and early 70s that I inherited. (My father was a radio DJ during the time.) I'd never heard of 90% of the bands, despite already owning hundreds of albums from the period. The same will be true of the music that's popular now in a few decades.

Also, using harmonic progression alone as a measure of musical complexity or richness is misguided. Steve Reich's Violin Phase contains only 5 notes, but was a seminal piece of minimalist music in the 1960s:

http://grooveshark.com/#!/s/Violin+Phase/3nPoC4?src=5

Musical richness can come from a lot of places. Hip-hop, as a genre, tends to focus on rhythmic texture and narative content. I'd say, on average, pop hip-hop these days is richer than pop rock. There's also some really great stuff that's come out of the hip-hop world, depending on how far away from pop you're willing to still call something hip-hop, e.g. DJ Spooky:

http://grooveshark.com/#!/s/Peace+In+Zaire/2UyeL0?src=5

Just as an example, I love the texture of a lot of stuff from The Roots:

http://grooveshark.com/#!/s/Don+t+Feel+Right/2LzmSC?src=5

(Note: Several members of The Roots are competent jazz musicians.)

Even Miles Davis's most known albums, Kind of Blue and E.S.P. represented a step towards more simplisitic harmony – "modal jazz" – far simpler than the hard-bop which was at the time prevalent and which Miles had previously played.

The assertation that harmonic complexity precluded the death of art music also seems off-base. Art music was always high-falutin' stuff that mostly rich people, or those wanting to emulate them, listened to. The rise of the relative importance of pop music had more to do with the invention of the phonograph than the increase in harmonic complexity. In fact, many of the first post-romantic composers, Satie, Debussy and Ives, tended towards more simplistic harmonies (arranged in ways that violated the rules of classical and romantic functionalism). It wasn't until the modern period, well after the rise of recorded pop music, that harmonies got particularly wild.
WWDC Partner Talks: How Parse Helps Developers Scale
Very true. But the 'coffee shop metric' makes it sound like they dominate laptops the same way they dominate tablets (where the iPad is something like 60% of the market), and that's not the case.
"Also, the maps are (IMO) significantly worse in quality than Google Maps."

Which kind of quality are you referring to? Image-wise? In terms accurate representations of the environment?
Cant blame Americans for being uptight. You'd never understand Sweden's freedom of speech :P
My apps crash frequently after I wake up on Lion.
I'm actually curious about this as well, is this actually legal? If it is similar to Wine, then isn't it just as legal as running Windows games in Linux environments?
No one, but you probably keep timestamps with seconds.
Ok, but there are a bunch of reasons why I think you should actively avoid "markets best served by hourly work":

* It positions you against the lowest-quality cheapest providers.

* It misaligns your incentives, so that you're penalized for doing a better job.

* It totally hides the cost of ramp-up and ramp-down (if you think clients push back on daily or project rates, wait until you charge them for 2 hours of "getting in flow").

* It forces you to be vigilant about time tracking lest you accidentally undercharge customers.

* Not to mention, with virtually any client worth doing business with, you (the consultant) are much more sensitive to the cost of a project than the customer is; it is a small miracle that the customer can get a programming project completed at all without potentially hiring and then firing 3 different people. So why is all the burden on you? Why is any of the burden on you? Key consulting idea: it's not the customer's money they're spending.

* It inclines you towards finicky accounting, the kind that charges a customer for a 45 minute phone conversation.

* It conditions your customers to take a fine-tooth-comb approach to project plans and invoices.

* Not to mention: it generates more invoices.

* It forces you to negotiate with clients in the worst possible numeric domain: where small deltas to proposed rates disproportionately impact the final cost.

* It obscures the final cost of projects in ways that make clients defensive, so that their immediate thought is "oh shit this is going to add up to lots of hours we better be careful".

* For that matter, it inclines your projects towards the small and away from anything ambitious.

* It impedes your own flexibility, so that you tend to miss opportunities to interleave projects or for that matter take an occasional long lunch.

* It forces you to account for every waking hour of your day in a way that daily rates don't, when we all know that only a small subset of your work hours are truly productive.

* It makes it harder for you to reasonable toss freebie work to your best clients without damaging the expected value of your time; for instance, I can cab over to a client in Chicago and spend 2 hours looking at a design with them for free without creating the appearance that my bill rate is arbitrary.
Doesn't matter. Apple maps needs flash to be displayed. iPhones don't support flash. Everyone who uses Apple machines has no choice unless they want to use a 3rd party app that isn't integrated into Siri and iCloud.
My advice is to try them both and see which one is a better fit for your style. With a modern PaaS like https://console.appfog.com/ you can deploy apps in many languages easily without the hassle of setting up entire stacks.
Considering all the problems BP had plugging one hole during Deepwater Horizon oil spill at the depth of only 1,100 m, I'd say this project is currently science fiction.
Why not both?

They're both fun to write applications in. In fact, why not pick up some Perl and maybe some JS while you're at it?

Limiting yourself to one language can teach you bad habits or start to close your mind to the possibilities that may be available in other languages. It's great to master a language, sure, but at this point in your learning, you should be reaching out all over the place to absorb as much as you can.

By learning other languages, you not only fill your tool belt with new and shiny things, but you learn to use the other things in your tool belt better. Different languages make you think differently about how you design and structure things. You'll find similarities, that will reinforce your basic programming but, you'll also find differences, that will open your mind to structuring or writing your programs in new and interesting ways.

I wouldn't lock yourself in to any particular language. You'll make yourself more marketable and a better programmer by becoming well-versed in many languages.
Population growth follows an exponential curve.
My first reaction to this was that they'd never be able to engineer a sturdy/safe tube across the ocean. Then I thought about the transatlantic telegraph cable (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telegraph_cable)- it was first built way back in 1858. That blows my mind.
Ok, so I posed both questions to my wife, and she answered both correctly, only pausing about 2 to 3 seconds before answering both. She then said the questions are stupid and are too elementary. Maybe this study is not foolproof and is only there to make people like me feel better about not being able to answer simple math questions better :P

Basically, once again, I've learned that my wife is smarter than me and that these studies should be taken with a grain of salt.

P.S. She is not a math person nor is she a tech person.
Watch This Happy, Happy Man Refurbish An Old Apple II
I live in NJ, about 4 miles away from my office in Manhattan and I have a 45 commute. Can anyone figure out how to solve that problem? It's a lot of fun to kill the afternoon talking about something that's never gonna happen. In the meantime, millions of people are wasting days a year crawling to and from work.
No mention of nuclear-powered "subterrenes"? I am disappointed ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subterrene
The Most Unwanted Song [1] and The Most Wanted Song [2] were a music experiment by artists Komar and Melamid. They survey people to find the most and least favorite musical instruments, genres, lyrical content. Komar and Melamid also created most and least wanted paintings by country.

[1] http://www.wired.com/listening_post/2008/04/a-scientific-at/

[2] http://www.wired.com/listening_post/2008/05/survey-produced/
It is in fact marginally lighter than the 13" MacBook Pro, but the difference from the 15" model is less than on the 13" Air. The 13" MacBook Pro is 1.35 kg, and the 13" Macbook Pro is 2.05 kg (53% heavier than the Air). The MacBook Pro with Retina Display (mid-2012) is 2.02 kg while the 15" MacBook Pro is 2.56 kg (27% heavier).

This one won't exactly fit in a manila envelope.
Actually, there's a few seconds (depending on distance from the epicenter) warning already. Body waves ("P" and "S" waves) travel through the earth at a greater speed than surface waves (which are what actually cause damage).

Japan's high-speed rail lines are already programmed to shut down when a significant earthquake is (automatically) detected from body-wave arrivals.

Of course, this only helps if you're not very close to the epicenter of the earthquake.

Also, not to be too pedantic, but "earthquake lightning" has only been reliably documented after or during earthquake rupture. It is a weird and apparently real phenomenon, though.
> I am tempted to believe this article is a troll.

Check the domain name for confirmation.
Get a pushbike. Persuade everyone you know to get a pushbike. Make them persuade everyone they know to get a pushbike.

Start a campaign for people to only use their cars if they i) Have to or ii) are travelling over 10 miles.

Make workplaces have facilities for cyclists. (Perhaps going as far as treating car-parking spaces as a taxable perk). Make schools have facilities for cyclists. Make shops have facilities for cyclists.

Persuade the bad cyclists to stop being idiots. etc.
Is it common practice to use one salt value across an entire site? I thought the idea was to generate a random salt for each user, in which case adding the username doesn't really buy us much extra. Applied Cryptography (from 1996!!!) seems to back me up on this, although it could be clearer about it. From the bottom of page 52, of the second edition:

"Salt is a random string that is concatenated with passwords before being operated on by the one-way function. Then, both the salt value and the result of the one-way function are stored in the database on the host."

If the salt wasn't re-generated for each password stored, there's not much reason to re-store it each time...

Edited to add: Granted, it'd be better than what people are apparently doing!
Yep, globe-spanning underground maglev/vactrains, which in the future-history of Genesis II (1973) and Planet Earth (1974) had been built in the late 20th-century and survived world war to be still working over a hundred years later.

The sci-fi of the past was way too optimistic about giant-scale engineering projects at the same time it was blind to advances and trends in communications and computer-mediated collaboration.
Thanks Thomas, really appreciate your feedback on this and the rest of the advice you've given in the comments too.
I believe this is the case with Macbook air too.
Face detection with large scale unsupervised machine learning [pdf]
Benchmarks for New Macbook Airs and Macbook Pros
I know a few others doing freelance design work, and they're also pretty good. They are doing very well, but I think the market for freelance programmers is a different story right now.
First hit on searching (DDG) for "japan earthquake epicenter infrared":

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/424033/atmosphere-above...
1000 machines, 16,000 cores, three days of unsupervised training, and it can detect faces without ever having been told a particular piece of data is a "face"
Moderators of HN: Please avoid this.
Here is a currently dead submission:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4102013

Additional facts:
http://hnrankings.info/4102013/

I would like to have Hacker News unbiased and open: the community taking care of avoiding censorship; to stay away from changing the wording of those content providers that give value to this platform.

The people of Y Combinator should now that for a product to be successful, you have to adapt to your customers.
Obvious seems to depend on conditioning. For me the correct answer to the lily pad question seemed completely obvious. On the bat and ball problem, I experienced a cognitive dissonance, the knee jerk answer appeared unbidden, yet something also seemed wrong about it so I stopped to actually think about it before answering correctly. Unconscious algebra would appear to be unreliable for most of us.
The MacBook was built in a sweatshop in China -- unless your nation has import tariffs, European regulations won't help that. But the price of a MacBook is still higher than in the US.
Nice site, very useful. Do you scrape all your data?
Emulation is absolutely legal. There is a long history of emulators of all sorts in the market. And of course there was an important decision just last week that held without ambiguity that the mere interface to a program is not covered by copyright.
Don't know the standalone gem, I'll have to check that out.
I'll be glad to get some feedback on apnmachine :)
Hacker News is about as receptive of this topic as a porcupine is of balloons.

“Stay away stay away stay away!”
Goodbye cheap Windows 8 tablets: Windows RT costs OEMs $85 a pop
Anecdotally I've seen some pretty good articles on lesswrong, and some not so good ones.

But the idea "Hey, want to be more rational? Join our community" gives me the willies. If you want to be more rational, then joining a groupthink-ish community is the last thing you should want to do.
But as with all things, you don't need anything like 100% coverage to get an app to work. Just handle the obvious stuff, and patch as needed until your target works. Then repeat. This is how WINE worked in the early days: you don't start with a copy of the win32 API, you start with a program you want to run and see where it fails.

Most apps, for obvious reasons, use only a tiny fraction of the platform. And those bits they do use aren't always critical. Facebook, for example, wants location information but would be happy if you just lied to it and gave it a hard coded value.
Pwn with your Pi, like this.
I'm gonna be cynical-guy and ask if there's any indication that this is anything other than CYA, since "later next year" tells me work is only just beginning. Were there any leaks or rumblings before the backlash?

Regardless, this would seem to be a very uncharacteristic stumble for Apple in the expectations-management department.
I'd double check that next time you buy a new ThinkPad. I broke the screen on mine recently, and chose to replace it myself after being quoted an eyewatering (nearly cost of laptop) amount to have it repaired. The tech support person told me in no uncertain terms this would totally void my warranty.

Just worth checking.
I think the open source movement (as opposed to the free software jihad of RMS) has worked exactly how the market should work. Some manufacturers are addicted to secrecy, DRM, draconian copy protection, and restrictive EULA's. The FOSS movement, responding to this reality, provides alternate versions of almost any type of software you care to use.

So why in the world would it be reasonable to force Microsoft, Apple, or anyone else to give you something they choose to withhold? Instead, speak with your pocketbook -- refuse to pay their tithe, and work with open software and/or with companies whose policies on this issue you accept and agree with.

TL; DR: Market forces are almost always more efficient and less prone to unintended consequences than top-down laws and regulations. Let the market work.
If I recall correctly, Mr. Bradbury called a firehouse and asked the guy there "what temperature does paper ignite at?" and they thought about it for a moment and looked up some value in a reference manual. So don't go reading too much into the number. Also, note that the (US) DEA was founded in 1973, while _451_ was published in 1953.

Also, casual Internet browsing suggests values closer to 450 celsius for the autoignition point of typical paper, so don't go relying too much on any one number you get from the title of a book (or from a hacker news post, for that matter)
I lived in Southern California when there was a fairly large quake, I think either 7.1 or 7.2. At the time, I had an elaborate bedroom set with a floating mirror. For several weeks prior to the quake, the floating mirror periodically rattled. I found it baffling and couldn't figure out what was causing it. After the quake, it seems fairly obvious that there was some kind of pre-quake energy release going on. It seems to me there should be some means to predict that a quake is likely. I just don't know what it would be.
Light rail is above ground, often operating alongside street traffic.
If a future update mentions 'phase modulation' we'll know they're just cribbing excuses from old Star Trek episodes.
Does anybody else think secretive companies annoy customers more than open ones? A lot of bad feelings could have been avoided yesterday were this public information, without Tim having to e-mail someone to break it. There was a genuine rash of anger, obviously (from the HN coverage), and just taking a few moments to say what's in the pipeline, while very not Steve, would have made this situation a lot better.

It's not just Apple I've noticed this with. Maybe it's time we rethink secrecy from a product development standpoint? Does it really give your competitors an advantage to know what you're working on in the days of the Internet? Is this something that business types have put thought into, since secrecy seems to be the status quo?

I can understand new products entirely, but a simple update to their Mac Pro is something they could just say, publicly, with little recourse, to reassure its small (and dedicated) fan base.
I'm a little baffled by the pricing here — Microsoft's goal in the desktop world seemed to more or less break even on OS and push the application suite for the real cash.

Does anyone have a sense of whether this makes sense at all? Perhaps the 'preferred volume OEM' terms are hugely discounted.
Wow, that was really good advice! JS has been something I have been looking into recently and it's quite amazing the things it allows you to do. "Limiting yourself to one language can teach you bad habits or start to close your mind to the possibilities that may be available in other languages. " You're so right. Thanks.
Like I said: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/12/06/12/tim_cook_confi...