skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The train will never connect LA and SF.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/us/california-rail-project-advances-amid-cries-of-boondoggle.html?pagewanted=all

The first phase would be a 130-mile stretch from
Bakersfield to just south of Chowchilla in central
California, at a cost of just over $6 billion; of that,
$2.6 billion would come from a $9 billion high-speed rail
bond passed by California voters in 2008, and $3.5 billion
from federal stimulus money.

...

The authority said it chose the relatively remote section
in the Central Valley as the first leg to be built, even
though few people there are looking to use a railroad, so
that construction could begin next year and meet deadlines
for using federal money. But critics suggest that the real
motivation was to get the spur in place, calculating that
future legislatures would not be able to abandon the
project before it reached major population centers.

“What they are hoping is that this will be to high-speed
rail what Vietnam was to foreign policy: that once you’re
in there, you have to get in deeper,” said Richard White, a
professor of history at Stanford University. “The most
logical outcome to me is we are going to have a white
elephant in the San Joaquin Valley.”

There is no plan on how to finance the project once the
bond and federal money is exhausted, beyond a hope of
private investment and public money during flusher times.
... Beyond that, several experts suggested that the train
would never attract the promised ridership, in no small
part because unlike, say, the Amtrak Northeast Corridor,
the bullet train would go into cities that do not have
particularly extensive public transit networks, forcing
people to rent cars once they arrived. Low ridership would
undercut the economic and environmental benefits that are
part of the argument for the project.
Congrats on shipping your first product! It looks very clean and awesome so far.
They have Organic Farming on Mars!
Oh, wait ...
I guess I'm pretty naive in wishing they'd accidently rolled over a fossil.
Perhaps you focus too much on the bad apples? Anyone can call himself/herself an SEO, just like the barrier to entry for programming jobs is low. Not every programmer writes malware, just like not every SEO creates spam sites.

At least two major things you gloss over, don't give SEO's enough credit for is:
1) Analytics and market research
2) Accessibility.

Improving quality of content and on-page SEO follows well established accessibility guidelines. SEO's can make sites better for all users: humans AND search bots. With a fine SEO'd site, you'd be able to navigate it and consume it, while being blind, drunk or using noscript.

If you have a good (online) product or service, it would be a crime against the efforts that went into creating them, to forget SEO and online marketing. You'd be decreasing the perceived value. You'd give the edge to your competition.

The grossness from SEO comes from people that know just enough SEO techniques, but not how to properly implement them. They hear: Links increase ranking, so they start blog spamming links. Or they hear: fresh content does well in search engines, so they article spin some RSS feeds.

Search engines are for the most part black boxes, even to white hat SEO's. To play it safe you have to align yourself with the vision of Google. To study their papers and patents. To follow their engineers every word. To predict their next moves. To test out your hypothesis. Familiarize yourself with new (sometimes undocumented) mark-up etc.

Yet good SEO practice hasn't changed all that much in the recent years. Adhere to the Google Webmaster Guidelines [1] and the Stanford Credibility Guidelines [2] and you'll get mighty far. Both sets of guidelines increase the quality and the profit part is indirect.

[1] http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...
[2] http://credibility.stanford.edu/guidelines/index.html
Anybody know how to do the equivalent of C-x C-e in vim mode?
Thank you! All the credits for the good looks should really go to Twitter Bootstrap. I'm a pathetic designer and if left to me the app would have looked like this (http://imgur.com/YYogy). All I can say is: thank heavens for bootstrap :P
How I sneaked into the tech industry without a degree and got my first job.
I don't understand, from briefly looking at nknight's previous comments, I can't see a reason for that kind of punishment.
Apparently, it's quite uncertain how much (if any) current volcanic activity there is, which would make organisms a possible source:

http://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-amp-space/article/20...

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-09/mars-methane-c...
How can they be sure it's not earthly contamination?
You mean IRV does not satisfy the Condorcet criterion. IRV is not the only preferential voting system. There are others, e.g. ranked pairs[1] which do.

Under ranked pairs, each pair of candidates is considered individually, largest majorities first.

In bradbeattie's example we have:

C > B: 115 votes
C > A: 85 votes
B > A: 85 votes

So the group preference is C > B > A and C wins.

Ranked pairs fails the participation criterion[2], but it is still possible to vote tactically in a way that guarantees you will not harm your first-choice candidate by participating (since if your first choice is A you can rank A first and all the others joint second. Similarly if your goal is to prevent C from winning, you can rank C second and all others joint first.)

[1]:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_pairs
[2]:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participation_criterion
And then a hurricane hits and you lose power for a week... (this was the event that deterred my super smart plan of hosting in my house years ago)
I agree, I do not deserve points for just saying how I 'feel' about outlook.

Thats no fundamental reason. Just a feeling. It depends on how you look at it: this feeling, just not liking it, might others have as well.
For those who understand italian, here you have the news explained with details from the head of Scientific American in Italia, in video:
http://video.repubblica.it/dossier/curiosity-sonda-marte/cat...
Wouldn't this be just like a plea bargain?
Plain and simple (if you could ever call it that) exploratory programming? The sort that yields stuff like Jared Tarbell's stuff http://levitated.net/daily/index.html and many Chrome Experiments, etc.
Great work!

One Suggestion: When I have a bunch of objects selected and I choose to align them I think it should probably keep the selected elements relative position to each other and apply the alignment to the entire set of elements vs applying individually to each element causing them to smash up if they are on the same horizontal or vertical axis.
It's like going to a museum and seeing chewing gum stuck to the sides of the exhibits.

I agree with you, but on a fun side-note, I remember climbing the bell tower of a centuries-old church in the middle of nowhere, and being staggered by the amount of Victorian-era graffiti carved in to the walls.

I guess that the need to write "TOM WOZ 'ERE" goes back a long way.
> C# is probably my favorite language, although to be honest I don't have much experience with Ruby, Python, or Coffeescript.

http://i.imgur.com/iWBOL.gif
RedHat’s OpenShift now generally available
"we never do anything stupid because some manager/MBA/suit-type has power without knowledge."

The Times They Are a-Changin'
Her 'findings' are not really related to hackers. In fact, every observation she makes could equally apply to physics geeks of the 50s.
Without more details this is not a very interesting new. Methane is an organic molecule and we have found it everywhere in space: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane#Extraterrestrial_methan...
Thank you. It is like nobody has ever heard of the ngen utility before. You have been able to compile a local copy of a C# application which runs "natively" since forever.

It does improve performance, but doesn't magically turn it into a ASM/C/C++ executable for the reasons set out above.
Bit of a tangent, but does anyone know of a service where I can copy in a pdf url and get a rough approximation of the content as plain text html?
The neural signature of viral ideas
Jumped on my own name email address on Outlook when they relaunched the new look and I have to save I love it. I find it much easier on the eyes and in the UX department than Gmail.

Gmail to me feels stale and over encumbered by labels and buttons and checkboxes.

There are some thing about Outlook that do annoy me, mainly how it doesn't want to save my password in the login form and automatically fill it in. It's ridiculous. I also dislike having to type my email address instead of just the username. `foo@outlook.com` it gets tiring.

I don't regret switching! :)
Thanks for trying out Mocktails.

To get the behavior you desire, you could group all the elements together and then move that group. The alignment option is specifically for aligning all individual elements to one particular baseline. Like for example if I am building a form and want to align all the fields in the form to each other, I would select the fields and then align them to selection left.

If I have misunderstood your comment, could you please elaborate a bit?
The wikipedia article supports InclinedPlane. And the title of your submission doesn't include "Perhaps", so it is quite misleading. I think maybe you need to check your information first.
Nexus 4′s Glass Back, the Worst Idea Since the Last Phone With a Glass Back
Tried it out on Windows. Was liking it, but then discovered that it is converting my files to UNIX format when saving them on Windows!
Aw the memories of reading the Morris worm thread with barely a faint clue of what a Unix system was like.
Once on US soil, with alleged crimes on US properties, he's under US law. If he has a signed deal that's something, if he's coming here with hope and a verbal agreement, as is enforced by honor in Europe, he's an idiot.
In the soil. They found organic molecules in the soil. So no methane but something solid I guess. And remember, they couldn't find methane yet on mars, Curiosity results were negative. http://www.nature.com/news/nasa-rover-yet-to-find-methane-on...
Superfast issue: Selecting a color in the label popover, and closing the popover does not close the color popover.
This sort of feels like an argument with someone who prefers to optimize the hell out of things in the best possible way. Thats a fair position to have and to take in this day and age.

What virtualization allows you to do is optimize the organizational responsibility. If I am developing internally on my VM, when it gets certified by ops management, and rolled out onto the live VM stack, I can be very sure what I am being responsible for; the ops also can be sure (because they maintain a huge VM filesystem, mostly) that they don't have to deal with things at a very thin slice.

For web operations, look, its simple: VM is good enough because there is so much overhead all over the typical web stack that a few frames of difference are, largely, irrelevant to the use case. Okay, don't put your multiplayer live realtime universe hashes in a VM; those belong bare metal. But the web front ends that are serving the same old content, over and again .. these are well worth putting in a package which can be massively deployed at whim.

A typically well-packed VM, consisting of only the hand-optimized built image of a development team with this in mind, can be a very, very tight package. I've seen reflectors and mongodb proxies and so on, packed into 256meg boot image that can be replicated simply by giving it a new name .. deploy 2,000 copies of these VM's, and you have a massive solution to the front-door problem..
Why the Sexy Kim Jong-Un story was reported as news by the People's Daily
http://cdn.memegenerator.net/instances/400x/30936334.jpg

before talking about "beautifing" the web, please make your font bigger it's hard to read
The link should probably go directly to the job posting, since the StackExchange -> Channel9 posts don't really provide any additional information.

The compilerjobs link (http://www.compilerjobs.com/db/jobs_view.php?editid1=648) has a bit more details:

"Specifically this work will include:

• Engineering parts of the reader for MSIL

• Creating a native compiler internal representation that the existing compiler can optimize
• Designing and implementing new managed optimizations to augment the existing optimizer like range check elimination or speeding up C# constructs on vector machines

• Engineering and co-designing the ability to emit a new object file format that will support rapid linking

• Fixing all existing phases of the compiler so that managed code can be correctly and efficiently compiled with the new auot-vectorizing/auto-parallelizing Win 8 compiler."

So, this sounds to me like an element of high-performance computing (maybe with the recent work getting Hadoop running on Windows?), rather than a fully-native toolchain.
I usually work for 6-9 months contracting and then set about an area of the world to travel, this year I've done Australia and Central America. Come April next year my plan is to start off in NYC, travel the states for 6 weeks and then spend 6 or so weeks trying to promote my startup in SF.

As an added extra I would suggest checking out flightfox.com (no association), I recently plugged in an 8 stop trip and managed to get really good prices from their agents. The advice they gave though about where and when to book for the best discounts by airline was probably more useful.

A great tip other posters have noted, take the advice and book a single outbound flight then use other carriers when you have chosen your next destination.
Division, a new CSS Grid library
I dunno, it would seem mightely stupid of the US authorities to drag him off in chains as soon as he's on US soil. If they do that, they might have a hell of a problem the next time they want to extradite anyone.

Not to mention that you're now into "diplomatic incident" terroritory. I doubt the UK will sit by while a (white anglo) UK citizen is duped into going to the US and then imprisoned.
Yes I did. On my 32-bit Xubuntu machine, I called `sudo apt-get install kdevelop`, and it has informed me that I require 99.0 MB worth of archives, and that it will take up ~330 MB of disk space after everything is installed. For some reason, I recall `apt` telling me I had to download over 100 MB on my 64-bit machine...

Admittedly, a lot of the download size comes from additional dependencies, but still - I don't want to have to install all that when I use an entirely different WM, and there are alternative WM-independent solutions to begin with.
For this to be remotely usable, a cheap and lightweight (physical) client should exist. Your netbook with a fresh XP and nothing of value is a good approximation of that.

I wonder how low-cost could one go with a custom made USB device that just copies everything to itself after connecting. Effects of scale unfortunately don't apply, as it would have about 10 customers worldwide :)
Pearson exec: we need to be an ‘Electronic Arts for education’
Thanks for trying out Mocktails and reporting this issue. This should not be happening as there is code in there specifically to prevent this. If possible, could you check if there are any javascript errors printed to the console? It would be of immense help to track this and fix it. Thanks!

EDIT: Also, what browser (with version) and OS (with version) are you using?
Isn't that a sure way of not getting anybody competent ? Isn't that the hallmark of incompetence to think that you are better than everybody else.

When I was younger, I was also producing software faster, doing in 1 week what the senior were expecting in 1 month. Well, in reality it took the rest of the month to make it really works, but in my mind at the time I made it faster.

Nowadays I would still beat the deadlines with working software most of the time. Most of the time is the kicker. I know that I could need 1 month even though I will likely do it faster.

The more I know the more I find stuff that I don't and the less I would present myself as "the best".

Unreliable, delusional, unexperimented people, ... will reply to that offer.
Fantastic! I've seen a lot of these apps and this one looks really promising. Please, carry on :-)
But it does matter if you're using a Pi or an old laptop. I mean, those two are just radically different, but even for fairly comparable platforms you often end up having to do adjust procedures, you can't just blindly follow a how-to.

For a newbie, those subtle adjustments are often the difference between wifi working and not working. An experienced user will figure it out, but it can take forever.

The RPi isn't the cheapest or the fastest or the smallest or the most featurific board in its niche. But it's got great value as a standard platform, which means if you've got a problem, chances are someone else had it before and maybe wrote up a solution.

Of course it all breaks down once you start using external hardware, which I found out when I tried to get my USB wifi stick running (unsuccessfully). But at least you can google "raspberry pi <manufacturer> <model>" and get advice specific to you.
Any cached version available?
?? I say he is a Director, InclinedPlane says he is only the "Head". The wikipedia article states without doubt that he is a Director. How is that supporting InclinedPlane? Pfff....
Thank you for your kind words and for your time. Really glad you liked the app.

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Yes,for intra-page bookmark
Summary: Author hopes we don't find life on Mars because if it's dead that provides an ill omen for the human race. He thinks if life on Mars wasn't sustainable then he repeats the whole argument that there must be some reason why advanced civilizations can't manage to get off the original rock they're assigned to and that's why we haven't seen any other intelligent life.
Tap2print (http://www.tap2print.com) Custom API to allow for printing and fulfillment of almost anything from content in your app.
Since when does Google run huge virtual machine clusters?
It's a nitpick, but what kind of consulting pays $22k after tax from one month's work? Does Ruby/JS consulting really pay $500k a year in the US?
Here we go:
http://viewtext.org/article?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nickbostrom...

I'm really paranoid about loading unfamiliar websites up (I've got a version of Chrome with js and plugins disabled that I use for random links), and pdfs are still a bit of a concern as an attack vector. It looks like this viewtext.org will come in handy.

</tangent>
Not a URL but arguably more useful:

$ curl http://www.nickbostrom.com/extraterrestrial.pdf | pdftotext - -

Don't forget the two dashes, as it doesn't default to reading stdin, and doesn't default to writing to stdout when instructed to read from stdin.

Also, pdftotext is part of poppler in Arch and poppler-utils in Debian.
"_____Perhaps_____ Curiosity has found simple organic molecules,"
Show HN: Print nice calendars (and test psychological assumptions)
We use printed calendars a lot in planning out the jobs we're currently working on, there's a bunch of generators already out there but none of them look nice, so we made one that does look nice!

We don't really plan to attempt to monetize this, it's mostly an experiment to see how people respond to it, how the placement of the donation buttons and the like buttons affects peoples behaviour, and maybe as a way to get some exposure for our company.

The website is http://plaaan.com

I'd love people to get some legitimate use out of it (I think it's a worthwhile product, we use it!) but I'm also keenly interested to gauge how people react in the final moments of the experience, when they've downloaded the calendar and are prompted to help us out. A few things I plan to test:

- Addition of the word "or" between the donate buttons and the social buttons. Does forcing the option between the two make the "like" more attractive?

- How does changing the suggested donation values affect the probability that someone will "like" (does the suggested donations set a value in the users mind? If they think it's worth more, will they more likely "like"

- How does changing the range between donation values affect behaviour, does a tighter range (ie. $5, $6, $7) suggest a more definite value to the product and make users more inclined to like or donate?

- Will putting the "like" buttons above the donate buttons affect the number of likes and donations?

- What is the effect of making the donation a text box? Rather than giving definite suggestions?

What do you think of these assumptions?
Do you think it's a useful product? Would you use it?
Any comments on design/UX/my subpar coding/psychology, are warmly welcomed.

Obviously we need traffic to test these things, so tell somebody! (if you like!)
Isn't this somewhat related to the goal of the Roslyn CTP (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/roslyn.aspx)?
Nothing about this comment, short of your preference of C# over languages (and non-languages) you don't have any experience with, makes any sense at all. It's wild speculation based on a StackExchange question speculating on something that isn't even implied by a linked job listing.

Microsoft has not, nor will they, come to the conclusion that the CLR was a failed experiment.

As for the actual job listing, it has precious little consequence for anything or anyone, save for possible application speedups for certain use cases on certain architectures a few years down the road.
What will it connect after all $68 billion dollars is spent? Don't millions of people already fly between LA and SF? HSR is 50 year old technology that has been proven to work in several countrues. People in CA seem hell bent on building more roads.

One of the main excuses why it won't work seems to be because no one thought it was important to build better mass transit.

Btw, I was in SF last summer. BART and the trolley seemed sufficient.
>It all depends on which passport you carry. I am fortunate enough to have an Australian passport, but there are other western passports that are good with Visa issues.

I'm pretty sure there are a bunch of special advantages to having a Commonwealth passport in a Commonwealth country but I can't remember any off the top of my head.
organic : root of organism, to organize (a molecule that would be found in an organism)
There's also a version up on the PSF blog: http://pyfound.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/pythonorg-is-getting-m...
Tried it on Windows.
Why it is never a commercial-grade UI in projects like this?
Why it is not like Idea?
Why it is not like Visual Studio?
Why it is still glitchy, blinky, brogrammer-art thing?
I guess they try to avoid cases with too much media attention. Look at the negative press that the Megaupload case is bringing to them.
Interesting, but signs of (extinct) life on mars could have been seeded from earth.
This post is just an ad, right?
Improved autocomplete function for Google Maps
Bier: matig biergebruik vermindert klachten menopauze |
I may be reading into this a bit more than needed, but, why the inclusion of the white anglo?

Do you think the UK government would be more likely to let any other ethnic origin UK citizen, be duped, imprisoned and not be bothered?
Looks really modern. A really impressive improvement over what python.org currently has. I'm no usability expert, but links look like links and buttons look like they can actually be pressed, a small detail that gets overlooked these days.