skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We need to get deeper. Cancer is a direct result from genetic mutations, the very mechanism that enables evolution. It's a (or rather many) mutation that causes uncontrolled cell division while suppressing apoptosis and other mechanisms of the body to regulate cell growth.

(See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P53)
Well, vehicles (planes, cars, trains, etc. all use gauges) use them to display data in a very different way than information dashboards.

If we look at the points OP listed:

* hard to scan (insufficient contrast between needle and gauge)

Gauges in vehicles typically have a high contrast (orange/blue needle on black background)

* typically don't show labels/values for boundaries

Labels for boundaries (and in between values) are present

* typically don't show labels/values for scale/units

Units are given (or are implicit; i.e. for the gas tank gauge, I don't really care about the unit that much– all I care about is a very rough estimate of when I'll have to stop at a gas station)

* typically don't show labels/values for alert thresholds

Alert thresholds are clearly labeled, and they are also rarely reached (it is rarer for the typical car to go over 140 MPH than it is for a web server to encounter a critical level of dropped requests, for example)

* even when labels are present, they are still difficult to read quickly
due to lack of alignment

Labels are legible on vehicle gauges in part because a) there are few of them and b) you know what value interval to expect (i.e. when driving on the highway, my gaze will not start at 0 and go upwards looking for the needle, but rather start instinctively around 60 or so)

* when displaying multiple gauges of related metrics, you can't visually
compare them without looking closely

Metrics tend to be fairly independent (i.e. you only ever really need to interpret one at a time) in vehicles.

I'd say it's an historical anomaly that digital interfaces use gauges to display information (precisely because of vehicles), but in vehicles they actually make a lot of sense.

Gauges are not the "comic sans" of dashboard design; they actually are a fantastic solution for a very specific type of information display problem.

But many digital designers resort to them because we are so much used to them, when there are in fact many other options available when displaying more complex/nuanced information. The book that OP recommended (Information Dashboard Design) is a foundational text in that topic and comes highly recommended.
I look at the numbers because they are something that can not be speculated and manipulated easily.

Lets take a claim "a random chance could land you in jail". I've seen numbers that percent miscarriage of justice in US is about 5-10% (not sure it's correct, but anyway even for death penalty there are many mistakes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrongful_execution). So for modern US 0.05% (about 160000 people) are in jail by random chance. I don't have numbers of USSR and, again, I am not trying to compare. I show that you should be very careful when using simple claims without numbers.

Or let take "simple political joke". Do you know that in many modern countries you can go to jail for ten years just for telling something that is not accepted by mainstream (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial#A...)? Again it's incorrect to compare. but I think raw numbers people in prison is quite accurate and objective estimate of "badness" of system. And for USSR in thirtieth numbers doesn't look very terrible.
So, what is the next step after the safe state? Reset and hope the next error happens in 10K years?

(Its also interesting how its much easier to think of a "safe mode" onde the thing has landed... during flight I have no idea what would that be!)
See my response below [0], but one of the main reasons they did this with GitHub was to try and make it easier to take user contributions. They know their data is wrong and they want help fixing it from the community.

As a contributor to OpenStreetMap that spent tons of time using their building and street centerlines datasets to improve OSM, I noticed that their data was wrong in tons of places. I approached the city to ask about better collaboration with OSM and about fixing their license to let OSM use their data. After that conversation they committed to releasing data and soliciting feedback from the community.

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5316115
Thank you. You words are great inspiration, and it encourages me to work even harder to achieve my goals.

I am definitely picking the harder path, but I believe that in the end it is the right decision.
Hilarious comparison with the self-driving cars. The whole POINT of a train is you arrive in an actual PLACE. Not some god-forshaken dump surrounded by parking lots.

In 2011 I was in Zurich during "street parade" which is one of those crazy european things where lots of people gather to dance to awful music. Anyway, the attendance was nearly a million. Substantially all of these million people arrived by train in the six hours before noon on the day of the event. I was flabbergasted watching these people pour out of the rail station by the thousand. This is totally impossibile by road.

The contest between trains and cars is not about the way people get around. It is about the way they live when they are not moving. Trains enable the kinds of cities people want to visit. Cars hollow out and destroy cities.
To complain. He could change his life. He could code fun games. It's his own choice to code things uninspiring. Many people work in careers not right for them. Why is he doing something he doesn't enjoy when there is so much other opportunity for him to enjoy his life.

Making things come to life through code is a joyful delight. Writing an entire complex programming at once in a rush, compiling it, running it, and it actually works... first few times, hundredth, thousandth time sometimes it's still amazing. And I'm no expert programmer. I mostly paint.

Based on his writing, I believe this Smith is at risk for burnout.
Since this is completely relevant I don't feel terrible at all about pimping my essay about the Bridge between Emacs, Clozure CL, and the Apple Foundation Framework.

http://msnyder.info/posts/2012/05/icloud-reminders-orgmode/
'Neurocomic' is a graphic novel that will teach you how brains work
Apple offers both matte and glossy finishes on their notebooks

This has not been the case for years.
Can you keep us in the loop with how this progresses so we can cover it?
About 6 months ago in my lab we had an acid attack. One student took offense to another telling him what to do, grabbed a hammer and the nearest vial of sulfuric acid and chased the guy down, knocked him down, and started pouring acid on him.

About the only lucky thing about the attack is that the victim didn't get any his eyes, but months on he's still recovering after multiple skin-grafts.

There isn't really a lesson that we can fathom from this really. It happened about 24 hours after an incident when the perpetrator had gotten angry and thrown a beaker on the floor, and literally 5 minutes before the acid attack happened (when the previous events were related to me) I commented that we should take it more seriously because if someone's not in control that's how acid gets thrown on people.
During an English class in High School, my teacher (we'll call him Mr. Jones) came into the classroom and saw the following written on the blackboard.

YOU SUCK JONES

Mr. Jones proceeded to make this into a lesson about the importance of commas.

YOU SUCK, JONES

and

YOU, SUCK JONES

have wildly different meanings.
> the journey itself is pleasant while watching the world pass by outside

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.

> as a project that would likely be subsidized with tax dollars

... it's going to have to wait for enough of the Tea Party to die off before it's politically viable, and by 'Tea Party' I mean anyone who is primarily concerned whether every single cent the government spends can be justified through a purely Originalist reading of the Constitution unless the money is going to fund the military and/or the police.
Thanks for sharing we'll be compiling a list.
The bundler_signature_check code that accompanies the article is available on Github: https://github.com/bradleybuda/bundler_signature_check
I received the same Chromebook on Thursday, and also gave Crouton a shot. I pretty much completely agree with this review. Although I've since ditched Crouton and returned to the verified OS, at least for now. Overall the machine and ChromeOS are very pleasant, and I hope this style of computing keeps growing and catches on.

The hardware is very impressive for $250. I especially find the keyboard and trackpad very functional, much more so than many PC laptops that cost 4x as much or even more.

The wifi issues are very annoying, and I suspect they are at the hardware level and probably not fixable. I would have gladly paid another $20-50 or whatever it would have taken to get a better wifi chip in the machine.

Another alternative to Crouton is using dev_install, which is how Chrome OS developers get a decent dev environment going on their machines. I've not yet tried this, but plan to.

I truly hope to eventually find myself using ChromeOS as it was intended and still developing with it. This basically means using something like Cloud9.

Oh and another thing I am finding nice about this machine is it's a great test bed for HTML5 games. The current game I am working on crashes on the Chromebook if I enable sound, I suspect I am loading too many sound files and running out of memory. It's good to have a handy "lower end" baseline to test things with.

EDIT: I forgot to mention, I really wish ChromeOS would let me pin bookmarks to the taskbar. You can only pin apps, not websites.
Show HN: Testimonial Board - Generate more sales
Ask HN: if you would want to move on from IT, what would you pick today?
If you would felt burnt out from doing IT, what would you shift towards (of course maximizing your chances on continuing to be well-paid)
Ah, looks like you're mostly right. They don't do that anymore, but when I bought my MBP in early 2012, I did have the option. I'll correct the article, thanks.
All these criticisms seem to apply equally to roads and bridges
In terms of the backend, OKC have their own webserver, OKWS[0]. It's been discussed on HN before[1].

It's a clever and IMNSHO insufficiently copied architecture with interesting performance and security characteristics.

[0] https://github.com/okws/okws
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2077484
It would depend on your (and my) behavior everywhere, not just in this particular comment thread.

If you (or I) had a history of making replies to (almost) everyone who replies to you (or I), then yeah, I would want the system to curb your (or my) instinct to reply to everything with some kind of waiting period, and I'd want that to kick in very, very early.

My sense is that the people that do this aren't very self-aware (i.e. have poor social skills), and as a result, it's not really possible to convince them to stop making things bad for everyone -- since they don't know, and don't think, they are.

An impartial filter would eliminate the drama and achieve the desired result without having to try and change their behavior, or publicly shaming them (as other commenters have suggested).
Actually, you are incorrect about knowing why we (the western allies) are at war. 9/11 was carried out by Saudi's and had absolutely nothing to do with Afghanistan, no matter what the spin doctors say. And as for Iraq, what kind of reason is "Dubya"?

For me it's clear that the videos show a breech of International Law and possibly a war crime. Does the United States abide by International Law? Of course not. It doesn't even abide by the Geneva Convention. Nor even by its own constitution. When people look and see a 'republic' or a 'democracy'... this is illusion. It's spin. It's a fairy tale.

And as the ongoing Hedges v. Obama is showing, in all likely hood the US government is already torturing disappeared US citizens in black sites somewhere unknown.

As soon as anyone tries to shine light on these crimes (and they are crimes) they invoke powers that allow them to bury them and bring the full force of their system down on them to send a message to others. None of this is going to work. The more they try and surpress it, the more it will flare up. Bradley Manning is just one of the visible victims. There are and will be many more victims. Not least the many millions of innocents killed in foreign lands.

The western nations are an empire in decline. The middle class is decimated. The economy is toast. The numbers are all fabricated. It's all down hill from here. And as the BRICS rise, do you think they are going to forgive us our trespasses? Of course not. They are going to hold us down and fuck us for a long, long time. And frankly, we all deserve it.
The new high speed rail line between San Francisco and Los Angeles is projected to cost $68 billion. Atlanta built a new international airport terminal for $1.4 billion. I'd think at those prices we could fix the TSA delays between LAX and SFO for less money than building a high speed rail line to link them.
It seems we were relatively richer then though. The Stockholm subway and train infrastructure, with hundreds of stations, was built in this period with miles and miles of tunnels, and several dozen underground station. Today we have to go trough hell and high water for a two station tunnel extension. My dad worked a builder, rebuilding the core of the city centre those days. The bonus from 2-3 months work bought him a new car. Try that today. It seems two to three decades after the second world war for countres that wasn't devastated by the war was a really strong growth period.
Hrm. I thought they dropped the option in mid-2011.
Lets get one thing straight: you don't play poker against the house but against other players... Maybe this is a game can be beat... but you have to play sitting down.
That could be because the attention in the US has been focused on the computer and medical revolutions, not in heavy machinery and infrastructure. If you look at the US from 1946-1960, the whole face of society changed as the interstate highway system was built, car ownership extended to the masses, people moved out to the suburbs, tractor-trailers enabled nationwide networks of retail chains, and quick jet travel between cities became practical.

These things run in cycles. The fact that infrastructure hasn't changed much since 1970 doesn't mean that infrastructure takes forever to change, it means that attention has been elsewhere since then.
250$ Samsung Chromebook is the greatest mobile device I have ever owned. I hope they release new version of it every year with 250$ price tag but lighter, smaller, faster and with longer battery life. I will buy that new version every year.
"Vastly" is a relative term. See: http://www.netl.doe.gov/technologies/coalpower/refshelf/role... page 10.

Focus on the chart showing tons of greenhouse gas emissions per megawatt-hour. 1913 was still in a period of rapid technological development, but the curve necks around 1930. From 1930 to 2000, GHG emissions per megawatt hour dropped from around 1.5 tons/MWh to 1.0 tons/MWh.

This is what technological progress looks like. You have periods of rapid improvement followed by a plateau with extremely gradual improvements.
To be fair, whilst the poster might be able to quit and write fun games (although based on anecdotes from people I know who have worked in the games industry it's not as fun as one might imagine) by necessity not everyone in programmer can be a game developer or work at a startup.

Some % of programming jobs (probably a fairly high %) is going to be writing the boring crap. So if you want to work as a programmer you have to accept that there is a chance that this is what you end up doing for at least some or maybe all of your career.
I've encountered malware where the computer being used to administer the site was compromised, and the malicious code was injected periodically this way. So make sure your personal computer, as well as the computers of anyone with write access to the site is clean. Good luck.
Amtrak makes good money where there are customers, even with the same unions. It's almost 100% the fault of politicians that won't let Amtrak shut down low passenger volume lines. If we shut down the losers and actually invested the profits from the Northeast Corridor back into that line, you would see great growth.

You know, the way a company would do it.
Making Chicago a hub would be a nightmare. The city is already home to the worst highway gridlock in the US.

The hub should be shifted further west to help create another metro area, not to just add to an existing one that happens to also be very corrupt.
Namco is pretty tight about their IP, especially since they now have a tidy little business remaking their old arcade titles again using the original ROMs:

http://www.amazon.com/Namco-Arcade-Party-Cabaret-Cabinet/dp/...

The funny thing is that these titles aren't emulated, per se. They have re-implemented the original hardware (including Z80 core and various sound chips) and distilled it down to an FPGA, playing the code off of the ROMs stored in EEPROMs or Flash memory.
These cars are limited by aerodynamic drag power...

I mean future self-driving cars travelling at bullet-train speeds. For these, losses are dominated by drag.
Coincidentally, the modern conservative movement was born in the 60s with Goldwater and took hold in the 70s and 80s with Reagan.
3 Ways CrossFit Made Me a Better Hacker
I don't know if the self-driving car would survive your "street parade", but at least they can drop you off and then leave the city to park somewhere else until you need them again.
That's true. However, look at what happens to all of your customers when you fail to test. If you haven't limited, or at least tested the extreme ranges of allowable input to a system automatically pushing out live configuration to all of your routers, there's nobody else to blame but yourself. Sorry. Are most people this diligent? No. Should we be? Yes.
Fair point. There can still be a lot of work to ensure robustness and efficiency in the new setting (especially so if the execution model is particularly different).
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Uber Partners and Drivers
The freight rail system in the US is actually pretty good, and virtually all freight doesn't need bullet-train speed.
There's pretty much always going to be something that goes wrong, although sometimes it's not as important as other times.

To bring in some historical examples. On Apollo 11 there were two major problems. The first was that the chosen launch site was actually filled with enormous spacecraft-wrecking boulders so Armstrong had to fly the LM to a more suitable landing site (and almost ran the thing out of fuel doing it). The second was that a circuit breaker used for arming the ascent engines on the LM got broken during an EVA and the astronauts had to improvise by using a felt-tip pen to activate it. On Apollo 12 the launch vehicle was struck by lightning on ascent and the computers got a bit frazzled, but luckily someone in mission control (John Aaron) knew how to get the system back under control. During Apollo 13's launch severe POGO oscillations in the center engine on the Saturn V first stage almost tore the engine off the rocket (flexing the huge thickness of solid metal that supported the engines by 3 inches) before it was shut-down automatically, and later an Oxygen tank on the CSM exploded during flight. During Apollo 14 it took nearly 2 hours to dock the CSM and the LM (normally this took maybe 10 minutes), there was also a problem with a short-circuit in a switch which forced a software rewrite to be able to land on the moon, and then the landing radar altimeter didn't work and had to be rebooted.

I could go on but I think you get my point.
Acela goes up to 150mph. Even the Pittsburgh-Philly Keystone Line breaks 100mph.
You imply that logical thinking is a desirable trait for everybody, which may not be necessarily true. I think that programming teaches you a way of thinking that you cannot really get rid of after acquiring it, and though good for a lot of people, may not be good for everybody.

For example some artists may not want to "limit" their thought process to just logical, to more freely connect with and express their emotions (by no means am I implying that programmers lack of emotional connections). But after being trained to program it may be quite difficult to think any other way but logically.

I want to live in a world where I can find and talk to somebody who has not learned to program, who does not have any idea how computers work, but is exceptional in some other completely unrelated field, to see how they think, what their opinions are (which could be very different from my own yet extremely interesting). A world where (nearly) everybody has learned to program means it won't be possible (or at least very difficult) for me to do that.

Getting everybody to program of course has its many benefits to society, but the "What Schools Don’t Teach" video and similar articles always seem to imply that there is absolutely no downside, which I personally believe may not be true.
It is an interesting story about someone's life and overcoming adversity.

But don't fall into the trap and read anything else into it, the things you should fear in life are quite boring. Some comments seem to be going down this path.
I'm not sure about being well paid, but I've always thought doing pottery would be pretty relaxing and is about as far removed from IT as I can come up with.
Thenewboston - Let's Create an Open Source Social Network
Pure bullshit. If you seriously believe that Glass doesn't have a CPU or has under 20 minutes of battery life, your raging Apple partisanship is showing through even more than normal.

I'm willing to bet that you haven't used Glass, but don't let that stop you from desperately trying to portray it as vaporware, a PR stunt, or some kind of scheme masterminded by Satan himself on EVERY HN thread you can plausibly cram that nonsense into.

Between your recent posts about Glass and taligent's constant downplaying of Google's maps and autonomous cars, I have to wonder what makes you two work so hard at spewing blind hate for them here.
I always remember that it's "it's" because the apostrophe replaces the missing letters in contractions. E.g.

it is => it's

The possessive of 'it' doesn't need to replace any letters, so it's just "its."
I don't remember exactly, but isn't there an option to completely get rid of ChromeOS and install ubuntu? Does that work better?

I'm thinking of buying some as gifts, but preloaded it with Ubuntu instead. Is that feasible?
Apologies, I should. Note that it's also in my HN profile :). I'm not expecting to drum up business via this thread, but we do know a bit about the challenges of open data delivery.
It's fun to look at, but the trip from LA to New York would be about 13 hours -- and that's ignoring the time stopped at stations and assuming you can go 220mph the entire trip.

New York to some other city would be even worse. For example, New York to Seattle and you're approaching something like 20 hours.

I really love trains for short trips (NY to DC), but I just don't see the actual demand these long distance lines. Maybe we should just try and fix airport security and intra-urban mass transit instead.