skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm referring to getting around within the city itself via transit. All of MUNI's light rail lines are gigantic perpetual clusterfuck machines. Their buses are no better.

Getting to/from downtown and to the Outer Sunset easily takes an hour on severely over-capacity rail cars - a distance of a mere 6 miles. At rush hour the cars are literally packed - these are the most crowded transit vehicles I've ever been on on this continent, NYC included.

Their on-time performance is atrocious, frequently late by over 100% of their frequency (e.g., an every-15 schedule routinely results in trains late by more than 15 min).

So not only are the vehicles slow and infrequent, but they routinely fail to show up when they're supposed to. Every major study into public transit use will tell you that schedule reliability is critical to establishing a transportation network - without the ability to reliably make transfers people will simply stop using the system. The last I saw of it, MUNI vehicles were on time only 57% of the time (lateness is defined as being within 4 minutes of schedule, which in any large city transit is a margin as wide as a football field).

Large swathes of the city are entirely not served by anything even pretending to be mass transit - Pac Heights, Inner/Outer Richmond, the Marina, Russian Hill, are all big neighborhoods that are completely disconnected from any form of mass transit, BART, MUNI, or otherwise.

Buses are even worse off than light rail - there have been many efforts to improve the bus system to little effect. Efforts to make commutes substantially shorter (by taking out extremely closely spaced stops) have been repeatedly rejected by members of the public, who will proceed to complain about MUNI anyways.

Literally the only neighborhoods that have effective mass transit are the ones lucky enough to be connected to BART (read: Mission, Bernal, Balboa Park). These are the only neighborhoods that have access to a transportation system that is frequently on-time and actually reasonably fast. The BART has a slew of its own problems, but it's about 10x better than MUNI for getting people around.

SF isn't the worst transit system I've ever had to use regularly (Seattle takes the cake there, just barely), but it's severely under-developed and under-funded for a city of San Francisco's stature and ambitions (i.e., its very open goal of creating a car-free/car-reduced city). I dare say that if you do not own a car in San Francisco you will spend a significant sum on taxis, or Uber, or SideCar, or any of the other services that have been born from City Hall's transportation failure. That or you bike a lot.
>I'm responding to a universal claim by indicating a single instance in which the claim would be wrong, falsification basically. My argument is that those saying this is useless appear to be going against evidence that it has - whilst limited - genuine utility.

Congratulations, you have imagined an instance where the this device can be used. The constraints you have imposed are: that the land comprising the minefield must be used and will be used regardless of whether the mines are cleared; that there is no predetermined upper bound of what constitutes acceptable civilian casualties; that the cost of subsequent de-mining is immaterial (e.g., when the local population decides that maybe 50% wasn't good enough after all); that the terrain is suitably flat for the Kafon; and that the extant vegetation will not interfere with it.

Now, does the scenario you imagined actually exist in the real world? Or is this purely an exercise in mental masturbation? I would suggest that the scenario you imagine is not one that is common in the real world. Afghanistan is not the first place where mines have been used, and yet there don't seem to be many farmers in Vietnam or Cambodia re-purposing known, uncleared minefields. Almost all civilian mine casualties seem to be the result of people using areas where they thought there were no mines. My take-away from _djo_'s comments is that the Mine Kafon primary effect will be to make it very cheap and very easy to create large areas where people believe there are "no" mines, and that is a problem.

In engineering it is often true that a general solution is preferred to one which only works in special cases. The Mine Kafon seems to be, when viewed in the most charitable light, a very special-purpose solution which adds no value above the general solution. Viewed in a more balanced way, the Mine Kafon is a solution in search of a problem[1]. User _djo_ seems to be saying that, there are already tools which do what the Mine Kafon does, and they minimize not just the economic cost to the de-mining organization but also the human cost to the local population.

[1] Do you recall the article several days ago by Paul Graham about how to find good start-up ideas? One thing I took away from that discussion is that you should try to find solutions to existing problems instead of looking for problems that fit your existing solution.
Street tracks has to conform to the same strict rules as the regular ones. That's why they usually have much smaller average speeds, so things like huge run-off areas are not needed. Take a look at your video again: only in one place the car reaches 300km/h. Crashes on street tracks happen quite often (less room for errors), yet I can't recall any serious one. Ok, Kubica's shunt in Montreal looked scary - but Circuit Gilles Villeneuve is a semi-street and unusually fast track. The new ones are fine (safety-wise), really. Open cockpits and loose wheels are the big issues for now - both being currently worked on.
I agree with you that WebRTC is the obvious choice when it becomes available. It's simply too hard to get people to install a client. For users to install a client, the uses for it must be compelling enough to go through the trouble of installing an application. Dropbox is one example of how people will install software because the product offers something useful enough.

It seems like live streaming client programs simply don't have the critical mass of content available to force people to go to the trouble of installing specialized software.

The web is going to be a very exciting place indeed, once the webRTCPeerConnection.createDataChannel actually works and we can use application logic to send arbitrary payloads to peers over the internet.
Thank you. If your coding standard appeals to the aspergerish folks more than the neurotypical, it's probably going to sap the energy of the nerotypical and drain productivity out of the process.
Why I built *yet another* image sharing site?
I've built http://www.pixbin.us because I could not find any image sharing site out there that wasn't getting on my nerves in one way or the other.

I just wanted a way to quickly share an image on IRC (or some IM, or even twitter) without the need to register or login.

I wanted a site that wasn't cluttered with "recent photos" or <insert social network here> comments and likes and what not.
When I shared (or received) an image I wanted to do just that, show an image to someone, on a clean uncluttered page via a shortened URL.

I didn't want to make any kind of albums or do any kind of image organizing. I wanted to post it, and then forget about it and let the image expire automatically after 24 hours.

Basically I wanted a Pastebin but for images. Hence, Pixbin. :)
Hope you enjoy it.
The trouble is, it's not the same: Software Patents protect the design of the idea not the implementation. Even after the patent has expired, you still don't get to see how the product actually works. Also, the implementation is protected by copyright -- it seems unfair to give software double-protection.
Copyright bullies make me mad, but this does have the effect of sussing out the weaknesses in the system when all that is at stake is last weeks "Honey Boo Boo". Its like a trial run for the real deal.

By the time real hardcore censorship tries to become a world-wide phenomenon, the internet will already be well optimized to circumvent it.

If all that comes of this is a strengthening and legitimizing of bitcoin, its still a net win.
Working in the Silicon Prarie (Lincoln, NE), there are some cool tech companies getting started in the midwest for sure, but a lot of these articles are overblown. There are certainly a handful of companies doing tech, but there isn't nearly the "startup culture" here yet.

There has yet to be a Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Twitter, Microsoft, or even a Github or Heroku started here yet. A lot of the companies that do tech in the midwest are tied more to traditional enterprise software like banking software, insurance, etc. That's not a bad thing, but the idea of "Silicon Prarie" is as much spin as it is substance. Perhaps it will end up being a self-fulfilling prophecy where eventually the midwest becomes a bigger startup hub, but I don't see that yet.

That being said, I love the midwest and living and working in Lincoln.
First beta of KDE Software Compilation 4.10 released
Are people still using Facebook?
How To Create A CSS Animated Share Button
It's actually not written in the browser. It's a javascript API that interfaces with a headless local process (communicating with AJAX over 127.0.0.1. It has issues with mixed secure-content warnings, though)
You won't get hyponatremia from overly "pure" or distilled water. The amount is water is utterly dwarfed by the amount in food.

If there are pollutants in air they will be in the water, but it's not a actually a problem because, although they might be bad to breath, most air pollutants are harmless when eaten.

Carbon (soot), Ozone, NOs, sulfur dioxide (smog), etc are harmless to eat.
> Edit: Actually, I think with the article "an" between the "not" and the adjective, there is no way in English grammar to interpret the "not" to negate only the adjective instead of the whole adjective+noun "evacuated tunnel".

Well, if you add another "only" before "interpret" then you'd be correct. Otherwise, it is open to interpretation either way.

Panel 11: http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0367.html
> Isn't A/B testing about as far from that as you could possibly get?

No, A/B testing doesn't mean flip flopping on the message. You'd want to test various campaigns delivering the same message different ways to see which one converts better. Maybe one set of words gets more donations while another gets more volunteers while another barely gets anything.
perl does give you a lot of that, since if has a vaguely lisp-ish facility for modifying language syntax, and is in general very flexible, so it supports things like inheritance, deferred evaluation, etc..

http://search.cpan.org/search?query=acme&mode=all
This looks great. Excited so see more from this project.
When Did the Internet Get So Nice?
Every now and the something comes along that is a real game changer. The internet was such a thing and it in turn engendered with web, which gave us WikiPedia, the Khan Academy and now this. What a super concept!

I hope you guys will be able to avoid the various pitfalls and traps that other charities seem to fall in to (where it becomes more about them than about those they help), by the looks of it you will be in excellent shape in that department.

Edit: you've covered this in the faq, but you may want to make it more plain, your donations are tax deductible, you might want to emphasize that. Especially for corporations that's a big thing, and it could get you corporate sponsors willing to name you. I know you're peer-to-peer but don't underestimate corporate dollars and riding their PR machine for free.
Show HN: Want to learn to read and write Japanese?
Sheet: handy text snippets for your terminal
In the Unix environment, you may often write Java, Python, and Shell, all in a day's work on one project.
I know there's a number someone in my research. I just don't recall it. I'd have to dig it up.

Keep in mind that there's a lot more than container ships that also move across the canal. Tankers being one example.
I disagree. Video clips when he's not giving speeches show a man that was truly comfortable in his own skin. Depending on the subject, I think Bush would be fun to talk to in private. It might not come across to non-Americans, but he had a folksy demeanor that was appealing to my parents' generation.

Was he a good president? No, he was absolutely horrible. Probably one of the worst presidents in a long time. I think in part because he was so "folksy". He couldn't seem to relate to any of the professional, high class subordinates and world leaders that constantly surrounded him.

But one-on-one, in a non-serious discussion, I think he would be fun to talk to. Intellectually stimulating, no, but fun, yes. He doesn't give off the intellectual vibe that Obama does. But he does seem to enjoy having a good time.
Summary
· T-Mobile Galaxy S III is the most expensive one among other carrier variants
· Marble White version is slightly more popular and expensive than the Pebble Blue.
Without going into the email is alive/dead discussion.

Sendicate does look quite awesome, nicely designed, very sleek. I can see a market for that (even though Mailchimp does an ok job already). But other than that, I can't see what really makes it the future of email? or how it reinvents emails?
This site started as a hobby, to automatically send myself short study emails once a day, but then I thought to open it up to anyone, as a crowd-sourced (i.e., human) translation project for learning foreign languages.

I'm starting with Facta in Japanese and the New Yorker's financial page in English, but I'll be adding more sources (and eventually other languages) in the future.
I second this. Wonderful idea to be able to commit to funding before it's posted.
thx for your support!
> Or you could potentially use a magnetic field to do this (similar to a tokamak) but that seems be trickier and more expensive than a mag-lev rail.

Using Halbach arrays would do it, without any active control.
Can someone create a WebRTC web app in this way, so one person can broadcast to millions through P2P technology? Or would the browser vendors need to make certain API's available before they can do that?
> Pure liberty without mass is nonsensical.

That's a photon.
I wouldn't describe it as incompetent, it's just not forward thinking. We have a loosely enforced style guide that should prevent the formatting and casing issues, but what we need is actually a more dictatorial approach.

As I'm rewriting, I'm producing a style guide which is more prescriptive about things that matter, like writing reusable code. This includes trying to identify hotspots where extensibility is very important, versus areas where the code just needs to be readable and work. These deserve more love and attention from an architecture perspective.
Why does everyone expect this "tube" to be filled with air? A liquid is more interesting and it also stores a lot more energy when it moves ...
Well done! Support for Google Checkout and Amazon Payments will help a lot, I think.
No fucking way you're forcing biometrics on me. I'll give them a password. I'm not giving someone who wants access my thumb.
It seems like in about 6 months or so (crystal ball reading) this will be available in chrome stable. (createDataChannel is not yet implemented even in Chromium trunk)

It's already possible to participate in BitTorrent swarms in pure javascript with only websockets and typed arrays. (https://github.com/kzahel/jstorrent) It of course requires that BitTorrent clients know how to accept websocket connections and use websocket frames to emulate raw socket data (which is not yet the case, but very well could be)
yes, that notification informed me "Your item has been published. All changes will take effect within a few minutes." -- this got my attention quickly, mods please change link
I'd appreciate it if you put the same thought into the proposal that you did into throwing out criticisms that it already addresses.

If you run this with cars only, the mass of cars that you'd need to accelerate/decelerate is much higher. Also the heat issues that the cars need to deal with is also much higher. Separating plungers and cars means you accelerate/decelerate much less mass, and have far fewer heat issues to deal with. The plungers themselves will get too hot for humans, but that's OK because humans are insulated from them. (And I already said how to deal with the heat in the cars.)

If the flaps work as proposed, the air pressure directly in front of the plunger will significantly exceed the air pressure in the rest of the tunnel. The cars sit in a bubble of air maintained by that shockwave. I have not tried to do fluid dynamics calculations to estimate friction, but it is going to be many times less than with Jacques' idea. I can believe it could be low enough to make this system work.

I suspect that Elon plans to avoid right of way issues by building it in the ocean. If he doesn't do that, then it is very difficult to see how he can do anything like a “ground based Concorde” (his words) and still avoid right of way issues.
Is this real? If so, it's dumb and I'll take two.
Okay, but if you're floating under water, you've added a ton of new concerns. You're looking at a lot more than 1 atmosphere of pressure if you're under water, and a containment failure goes from stopping the transit to drowning everyone. Also you now don't have the solar panels Musk mentioned (they don't do so well underwater), and the oceans are not magically immune from the effects of earthquakes. Tsunamis can most definitely cause plenty of damage.

LA is also 17 miles from the coast, so if you're getting from downtown SF to downtown LA in 30 minutes, you've got less than 15 minutes to travel nearly 400 miles underwater in order to leave enough time to even attempt to get to LA under the deadline. You're now travelling at Mach II, almost twice as fast as Musk proposed.
The Linux client is not open-source afaik.
Would also love 128 bit ints to be commonly available. And I even have a use for them: representing the size in bytes of some extremely large storage configurations (sparse ones -- as yet a fully allocated > 2^64 byte store would cost several billions).
Refutations of philosophical ideas happen all the time. Perhaps Bostrom missed something subtle, that negates his argument. Or perhaps the logical form of the argument is incorrect, or perhaps there's no way to falsify it, rendering it on the level of most superstition.

Besides all that, you can prove negatives at least some of the time: logicians and mathematicians work on decision problems all the time. Sometimes they come up negative: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/DecisionProblem.html
If you can find a liquid with low enough friction to be feasible, I'm all ears.

The only ones that I'm aware of are thin gases or helium-II. The latter is rather impractical to use for a great many reasons. But I'd be interested if anyone has other suggestions.
C version because I was bored:

int is_valid_email(char *email) {
char *at = strstr(email, "@");
if (at <= email || at == strlen(email) + at - 2)
return 0;
return !isspace(*(at - 1)) && !isspace(*(at + 1));
}

Test cases:

assert(0 == is_valid_email(""));
assert(0 == is_valid_email("@b"));
assert(0 == is_valid_email("b@"));
assert(0 == is_valid_email("d@ "));
assert(0 == is_valid_email(" @d"));
assert(0 == is_valid_email(" "));
assert(1 == is_valid_email("a@b"));
assert(1 == is_valid_email("John Smith <x.y@z.com>"));
And even if you do it on a massive scale nothing at all will happen.

We have these enormous oceans on earth, and if the air gets dry more water will simply evaporate from the ocean. It takes about a month for air to completely circle the globe - and a whole lot less than that for air from any particular place on earth to reach the ocean.

So even if you completely dry out air in one spot it'll be replenished within a day or two at most. Meaning that overall you never will actually dry out the air.

And remember that on a global basis water is more or less never created or destroyed. So any water you capture from the air, will just end up right back in the air.

You water a plant and it converts the water to hydrocarbons, those hydrocarbons are then eaten, and are "burned" and are converted right back into water.

Same for the water you drink - it's only in your system temporarily, it will end up in the environment again later.
Thanks for including the skimfeed link. Didn't know they existed. I am building out something almost exactly like their site but going to expand on it a bit.
Prior Knowledge To Be Acquired By salesforce.com
How is it different from directly buying votes?
computational linguistics: computing semantic contrast
The maker/manager transition phase
Yes, I opened a ticket with them a few weeks ago. Still working with them on a resolution.
I thought Obama's IT formula came from the corporate marketing world, but was adapted to use in a political campaign. I've been hearing about sorting people into "cohorts" using statistical correlations for over a decade, and yet when I first heard about it, it was already decades old and originally based on pre-internet data from dead-tree media like magazine subscriptions and even so it was already very scary in terms of what they could tell about you.
I wish I was in the market for a 3D printer so I could boycott 3D Systems on principal alone.
Ask HN: Idea for PDF template server. Does anyone besides me need this?
I've recently come across a tedious problem with PDF generation for several enterprise web applications.

The requirements for these applications are nothing spectacular: Take some HTML form input, take a PDF template provided by the legal department and fill in the user input.

Problem is, with the usual (enterprise) PDF generation tools like iText or Jasper Reports you can do everything but the most common tasks like simple adding some text at a specific coordinate are ridiculously complex. Especially, if the aforementioned legal department didn't use AcroFields for the blanks to be filled in.

So, I tried to come up with a simpler solution to this problem. What I currently have in mind is a web app that takes a URL to a PDF template and displays it using Mozilla's pdf.js. Using some HTML5 canvas techniques it would allow you to drag and drop text fields as placeholders at the positions where you want text to be inserted.

This template and the associated placeholders would then be available via a REST API. This API would take key-value pairs as input for the placeholders and return a PDF rendered with that input.

My question is: Does anyone besides me need such a solution? Sure, the problem bugs me and such solution would provide some value to me but I first wanted to see if this issue exists for other developers as well or if maybe there already are viable solutions to it.
Once arbitrary data can be sent through peer connections via a browser javascript application, then there is no reason why the BitTorrent Live protocol (or some other similar P2P streaming protocol) could not work over WebRTC.

One difficulty I see is actually getting the binary data into a <video> element. It would be in theory possible to write to the file in the HTML5 FileSystem API and point the video element to it, but that would require transmitting the stream in a way that is ameliorable to seeming like a static video on disk.
If that's so, why do we give every one in the USA a black-and-white obligation to know and follow the law? Ignorance of the law is no excuse, we're often told. No slack gets cut for judgement most of the time.
Robert Martin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cecil_Martin) once tweeted (@unclebobmartin):

"When designs are cheaper than builds, e.g. a skyscraper or a bridge, big up front design makes good sense. But when builds are cheaper than designs, e.g. software or oil painting, short and iterative design and build steps are best."

I couldn't agree with that more.

I work in an industry where builds are not cheap and iteration after launch is nearly impossible. You better believe we have a very, very long design cycle.