skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is the way complex systems work, pretty much. The more systems and sub-systems you need to have running the more likely it is that one will have something wrong with it. And when you add in redundancy and extra capacity you actually increase the chance of something going wrong, you just reduce the chance of it having such a negative effect on the mission.
High speed Internet access whether DSL, cable, or ethernet requires "a copper wire in every home" [ok, fiber requires a glass wire, but it's still the same concept].

Why do you say copper wire is useles?
Data journalism in Latin America
Does anyone else see something wrong with Chicago being the central hub (specifically regarding our president's past history in Chicago)? Sure, it's not exactly like it would have been if Bush (W) proposed a large rail hub in Crawford, but Chicago isn't exactly the only choice for such a hub either. In fact, why not avoid a large hub?
Why Simple Is Better Than Your Bank, Both Online And On Mobile
Yup, and rail is much more durable, much less resource-intensive, and has much less of a negative effect on the environment than roads (in typical usage, a single dual-track rail line carries the same number of people as 10-20 lanes of highway)...
While I haven't tried Crouton, I've been able to get quite a lot of Development work done on my Chromebook thanks to tools like Cloud9. If you opt-in to the dev channel for ChromeOS, updates start coming in much faster (and generally very stable at that).
Ask HN: Is 25 too late to become a proficient developer?
Hello,
I did computer engineering during undergrad and have some programming skills. However, it's not like what's out there today. I'm trying to pick up web and mobile development and i'm wondering if it's too late to become proficient at 25. I've read several posts on hacker news whereby people starting out at 22 are somewhat discouraged. I really want to take this up so that I can build things for myself as well as eventually found or join a startup. I'm also trying to decide whether to focus mainly on mobile dev.
I know how many people hate these questions; however, any information provided is much appreciated.
Please advise.
I find it odd that you think it routine for a person to become aware of significant crimes and just keep silent out of loyalty or cowardice.

We're talking about massacres and real loss of life here.

Manning seems to be the kind of person who viewed his role in the institution of the military to be relatively powerless, but who had an appreciation for the power the press wields in shaping public debate and policy.

In my opinion, only a very naive person would assume that Manning would dutifully report his findings up the chain of command and feel relieved of any moral duty once his superiors were notified.
The fuel efficiency of a vehicle rolling on rigid steel wheels on a rigid steel track is FAR higher than that of a vehicle rolling on pneumatic tires on asphalt.

The number I have seen quoted is that a train can move 1 ton 400 miles using 1 gallon of diesel.
So you shouldn't teach arithmetic, algebra, music, art, literature, chemistry....or any number of other things because everyone isn't going to use those things professionally?

Personally I think programming is a better thing for grade schoolers to spend their time doing than so many other things. I think a very large number of them would find it fun, and less tedious than most of the other things they do, while increasing their logical and analytical skills as well as giving them a practical skill.
Thanks for the advice, I'll look into using Cloud9 and the dev channel.
Baby born with HIV cured
You are right, I was oversimplifying. For example, Wikipedia lists 4 more frequent types of brain tumors, and each of them has subclassifications. The origin of the cancer is important, because the cancer cell retain some properties of the original cells, for example if they are affected by hormones. So location is important to distinguish if it started as a breast or skin cancer, but it's not important to distinguish if it started as a hand or foot cancer.

(After metastasis, the location is not important to understand the properties of the tumor, but it can affect the symptoms.)
That isn't true. As another commenter noted, I work for Koordinates. Our top data users, by far, are Engineering and planning consultancies, architects and universities.

The first step to releasing data is releasing the data. 3rd party applications are nice to have, but they second-guess the use case. A developer can grab some data and use it to build an app, regardless of the source. But github is a blocker for the vast majority of the audience that is interested in ad hoc analysis, for whatever reason.
Newspapers go all-in for copyright fight against clipping service
Of course, the underlying goal is not that everyone should become a programmer, but instead that everyone should be mildly proficient in what programming is, how it works, and can hopefully accomplish minor tasks by writing simple bits of code. In order to get to this less ambitious goal, code.org aims higher.

If a million more students set out to become programmers, only a small percentage of them will become professionals, much like any other endeavor. But if we can even get to a point where this dabbling in code happens for a majority of young people it will be transformative enough.
So I want to live in a world where I can talk to people who have never learned counting or arithmetic. So I think we should make sure those people still exist, by denying a certain percentage of the population a chance to learn about them.

Seriously, what the hell?
Almost everyone in the US knows how to read, but only a small percentage are actually great writers and most people are downright terrible at it.

The same goes for programming. It should become a prerequisite at schools because software is indeed "eating the world" but only a small percentage of people who learn how to program will ever become highly competent programmers.
Maybe they just did an excellent job of convincing him that he had a choice, and funnelling him to the only option available.
Google feels that DRAM errors are about 8% per year from their studies. Cosmic ray interference is common enough to require deliberate software rejection modes when doing something Raman spectroscopy, so it's not like the probability of getting interference in memory chips is low.

It's just normally, the probability you've made a glaring bug while coding is way higher (and punching the power button is much easier then dissecting kernel states to find out if it's really a cosmic ray).
I agree with your reasoning but it's a bit deeper than "airplanes are 2x the speed of trains so therefore they are faster", and not just because airplanes fly a lot of extra distance for ATC reasons.

At major city airports you easily lose 2 hours with security, taxing around the airport in the airplane doing 5 mph, and boarding/deplaning. Not to mention any weather delays, and good luck if you have luggage.

Plus, most airports are not that close to the city center. Most train stations in the city center. I'm most familiar with NYC, but I can walk from my office to 3 train stations (Penn Station, PATH, Grand Central) in less than 15 minutes. The 3 airports are all an hour in a subway or 30 minutes in a $50 cab ride away. The airports are also more subject to traffic. The last time I flew to Florida from NYC, I spent more time on the ground getting to JFK, waiting to get on the plane, and waiting to take off to NYC than in the air.

With all that said, 200-300 mile trips make a lot of sense by train. Boston->NYC, NYC->DC by train make a lot more sense than airplanes even in the best weather. When the planes get slowed down by bad weather, forget it. Even Boston->DC by train makes a lot of sense, even today with our relatively crappy high speed rail.

I imagine a train up and down the east coast of florida, or the California coast with slightly better technology would do similiarly well.

But a train from NYC to Chicago or Denver makes no sense. And definitely not for NYC to LA. As soon as the portion of the flight cruising increases beyond an hour or two, it just kills a train.
Currently on front page with much discussion and links to other sources:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5315521
Couldn't that have been easily avoided with "Follow your dreams, but here's what you're likely to get paid with each of your career choices..." advice?

My sister and I are both good little half-Asians. My (white) mom eventually won the childrearing battle, so we were raised under the "Follow your dreams, we just want you to be happy" advice. Guess what? We both ended up in high-paying STEM careers anyway. Why? Because we both liked science anyway, and we were aware of (but not beholden to) average career salaries for the various fields we were looking at.

Now, there were a lot of times this could have gone otherwise. My sister almost double-majored in anthropology; I almost majored in philosophy or sociology. Oh, and I almost dropped/flunked out of college twice. But we didn't, because we had this background knowledge of what the real world was like and were somehow able to make smart decisions anyway.

There seems to be this assumption in this thread that teenagers are stupid. I reject that - I certainly wasn't stupid as a teenager. Of my teenage friends that were stupid, it was usually because their parents were stupid, and so the parents wouldn't be able to make better decisions than them anyway. Rather, teenagers are ignorant - they lack life experience, so they often don't have the full picture. The cure for that is to provide all the relevant information and then let your kid make their decision, it's not to make the decision for them.
"Or you can settle for a less sophisticated language and implement your project in a reasonable amount of time, though not as elegantly as you might like."

And be stuck maintaining horribly inelegant 10-year-old systems written in a "stable" language that was obsolete 5 years ago. A system where pushing a change in one module breaks 3 others.

But hey, "worse is better" right?
It's not for everybody and what people don't realize is that the day it's going to be for everybody is the day we'll have reached technological singularity.

And all bets are off when/if that day comes. My take on it is that we won't need anyone "programming" anymore by that point.

Until then you'll need people at least understanding the physical limitation of our devices/networks and being able to use at least logic (probabilities being a plus) and some "maths" to get the (programming) job done.

This is definitely not for everyone. Just as writing books is not for everyone.
I would say that programming is for everybody who is interested in how stuff works. While a career as a programmer might not be for everyone, it can be useful for someone who needs to create presentations or word documents to be able to write basic macros in vb, or for people who have websites to understand what is going on in the html/javascript. I think that is the thrust of the argument of the "everyone should code" brigade. Not that we should all be full time java/ruby/c# programmers.
They should sell them on the app store and get it over with.
Adaptive vs Standard AB Testing - this link is an adaptive AB test
They had a shuttle mission where everything was nominal, even the toilet kept working the whole mission.

But yeah, space flight is like that. Then again its relatively rare for a jet fighter to consistently return Code 1, no faults. Usually its Code 2 with minor fixes required pretty regularly. Code 3 is an abort.
You could see how long ago the person recieved their last message, how many messages they were getting on average and also I think some scale thing which could extrapolate how frequently they wrote back to messages. It was a long time ago but incredibly interesting / invasive.
If you are using this as a mnemonic about its/it's, this is fine; but your statement of it is as a rule ("the apostrophe replaces the missing letters in contractions") is misleadingly incomplete. Apostrophes do that, but they also serve as a possessive marker in the general case ("Sam's"), which is of course why its/it's causes so much trouble in the first place.
I think programming warps your thinking when you do it for 10 hours a day 5-7 days a week, not so much if you do 1 semester of it at school.
I'm an indie game developer and the way I see it is a choice for anyone to work independently. Some people are adamant about working for others and accepting whatever boring job they can get. Making games isn't the perfect thing to do, but it is possible, and I wouldn't trade it for anything. Yes, working at a AAA studio can suck, but that's a choice also.

Boring crap to you doesn't mean it's boring to everyone. Who are we to impose our value system upon others. Some people just love modeling 3d crates all day and that's their mission in life to create the perfect 3d crate. Other people walk by and wonder why he's wasting his life creating crate after crate. It's not cool to me to rationalize something someone doesn't like doing just because someone has to do it. Let someone who actually likes it do it.

> you have to accept that

Only if you are not in control of your own life. There is no rule which say what you must ultimately do. If your goal is to do x and that requires ultimately doing a lot of y, you can still change what you want to do to z and immediately go for it. So many of my friends are insistently passionate about wanting to work for AAA game companies and I know their glamorous dreams are going to put them through a lot of potential slog, but that's not the only choice. It is their choice to go in that direction and accept the outcome of that direction. There are plenty of other options.

Smith is idealizing coding games and working on programming projects which inspire him. He should go do either of those instead.
This argument is specious. Most people need to expend more calories than they do in the first world, hence the growing obesity epidemic.

You are saving gym time/portion control willpower by biking more and driving less.
The video is clearly meant to be inspiring. A lot of people think programming is too hard for them or not accessible at all, but that's simply not true.

It's worth inspiring them to give themselves a shot. Of course, not everyone will be good at it, like all things, but it's better to try it out and find out.

It's horrible to say to someone, "Hey there, coding is actually pretty hard, and while there are some really great perks to knowing it, you'll probably fail at getting there, and even if you don't fail, you might not end up at the place that has all of the awesome perks, just some of them, so you basically shouldn't even try."

That's clearly an exaggeration of what he's saying in the article, but I'm sick of professional programmers trying to discourage non-programmers from trying out coding. It can only be a good thing for them to learn a little, so let them have dreams even if they aren't totally realistic. Who knows, many of them may reach them.
Which could be good or bad or whatever, or a mix of both, or whatever. Seemed like a good idea at the time.
That's not too shabby at all.
Insects and Entropy (2005)
Cmd+T for open Chrome tabs
The thing I was most worried about was battery life. It must have been a different one where the advertised battery life was 4 hours. 6+ hours for $250 is much more tempting.
I'd take a high speed if it was cheaper than flying and didn't require all the security.
If we shut down the losers and actually invested the profits from the Northeast Corridor back into that line,

Yglesias wrote up this exact argument this week [1]. The Northeast Corridor profit he dug up [2] amounts to all of $136 million/year for the Northeast Corridor; a proposed upgrade is estimated at $151 billion [3]. (And the profit figure only includes operating costs -- the actually relevant figures aren't available).

[1] http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/03/01/amtrak_profit...

[2] http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Research/Files/Reports/2013...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_Corridor
By far the most insightful little tidbit in the blogpost:

"In the 21st century, the rules of the game have changed. Capital growth has become decoupled from job growth,"

Right now we're just approaching the middle of the curve though. It's not quite decoupled yet, it's just less solidly coupled. We still need lots of people, we're just starting to have the ability to replace them through slow and tedious optimization. With currently big disadvantages, like lack of flexibility. Soon we won't need people to begin with, and robots/programs will be more efficient, even when starting a company and they need to be agile and adapt fast. We're going back to the job situation of the middle ages : there is no economic reason to have >90% of the population at all. We're at the beginning of the slide back into 90%+ joblessness.

Nothing can change that, not policy (except maybe genocide), not "green", nothing. We just need to deal with it somehow. Preferably better than in the middle ages, although, making them all build churches decorating every last little square centimeter of stone might actually not be that stupid a proposal. Certainly preferable to how the middle east dealt with it, starting a global war of conquest.
It's great to see this topic finally getting more attention; it's going to be a defining issue for decades to come. The entire structure of our societies will need to change to acommodate populations with far smaller labor forces, and all its attendant effects. The most important place to start will be with culture, particularly the cultural belief in the "Just World Fallacy"; the old ways of thinking about social justice, and the idea of "deserving" will need to be radically altered.

The Economist has another good article on the subject:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/03/labour-m...
There are far better solutions, including things like http://ckan.org.. sounds like very little research was done before this decision was reached.
Actually when you put players of similar levels together and make them plays tens of thousands of hands together, all these players are going to be break-even... If not for the rake that the house takes.

This is already seen in online poker in cash games at some limits where there are a lot of regulars. And it's very often discussed (and criticized) in online poker forums, where they say that these regulars are just shifting the money all around, with the house being the only real winner.

So your oversimplification doesn't get anything straight.

When you play poker you play against other players and against the house (rake and buy-in fees).

To give you an idea: there are semi-pro who would be losing players but who are actually making quite a decent profit only thanks to the partial rake-back that the house gives them (regulars players playing lots of hands get back a % of the rake they paid, which is called the rakeback).
Sorry to disappoint you, but the answer is a simple no. Matter of fact, there are very few things that you can't start at 25 and become proficient at.
If I'm Apple, I don't need to come up with some kind of trick to make lots of money. I just need to keep releasing best-in-class hardware at competitive prices by leaving out expensive features 99% of my customers will never want.

I love my iPhone 5, not because of patents or lawsuits, but because it's really, really well built. I definitely couldn't have gotten it cheaper from anyone else. How many overpriced accessories have I bought? Zero. Because I don't need that crap-- and Apple doesn't make me pay for stuff I don't need.[0]

[0] Not counting the Mac Pro, that is.
The Coding Love
Thinking like this may make the idea of a universal basic income appealing. Good book I enjoyed on the subject: http://www.amazon.com/Whats-Wrong-Lunch-Democracy-Forum/dp/0...
Non-Retina 15" models still have a matte option.
Wading into an Online World of Chinese Dating
Since 1980, we've developed vaccines for:

- Hepatitis B,
- Chicken Pox,
- HPV,
- Rotavirus,
- Hepatitis A,
- and Pneumococcal.

There's also been a lot of improvements in existing vaccines, regular new Influenza strain vaccines, etc...

A lot of those simply got quietly introduced into the routine vaccination schedule for children and the diseases quietly vanished without much fanfare in those countries.

Polio is almost eliminated world-wide now, but that's taken decades.

http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pubs/vacc-timeline.htm

http://www.chop.edu/service/vaccine-education-center/vaccine...
> Unless high-speed rail becomes successful enough to become a real option, in which case they'll be economically forced to pack customers in like the economy class on modern airliners, if not tighter, to maximize revenue.

I traveled extensively via Europe's high-speed rail network during the summer of 2012. If you didn't know already, rail service has been the primary mode of transport for long-distance trips in Europe for several decades. The coaches are still luxurious compared with airplane seating, and I could recline fully and get up to go purchase some snacks or a meal.

The thing with trains is that they are not space- or weight-limited like airframes. It is much easier to tack on a couple of extra cars for heavily-trafficked lines than to pack people in like sardines, and it makes economic sense to keep train coaches comfortable if you are advertising yourself as the luxurious alternative to air travel. Given the European and Asian models, I don't see evidence that rail services will be forced to cut comfort like we have seen with the airlines.
I'll be honest, that's exactly how I saw this article - and I usually keep an open mind to things.
The point that the OP is making is not to avoid new technologies, but to avoid technology that isn't ready for prime time (and higher ed efforts are a great examples of this). That is "ok" advice in many cases, but don't avoid things because they are new. Few get great jobs and salaries for failing to take risks.
IRecords: An Apple Run Music Industry