skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, if we base a decision on historical performance of Amtrak, then it's not a good idea. Amtrak is a huge loser.

If we're really worried about "green" efforts these days, we should consider strongly what modes will move people most efficiently. This is one of the areas where common knowledge differs badly from reality. See, e.g., http://eapblog.worldbank.org/content/comparing-the-fuel-effi...

Trains are much less efficient than, say, buses, due largely to problems in filling the trains fully. And since this is all so political, you can expect this train to be worse thanks to the political wrangling that will force the decisions about stations and schedules to overwhelm efficient routing plans.
I don't really think facebook is all that innovative. Its pretty simple concept.I guess thats why it works.
Quick information filtering tip for people dealing with information overload and lots of useless information coming in from feeds:

* make an excel sheet, with the following headers "name","total posts","interesting","assets","valuable","significant","added" (day you added the list to the excel sheet) then the computation columns "% interesting", % assets", %valuable" "score","total days","posts per day"

organize your feeds by channels (interests like Software Business for Hacker News is what I have it under) of things interesting to you...
score = (# valuable * (#significant * 50))/(posts per day)

Hacker News currently has a score of 86 for me. When reading feeds on the total I just add the # unread, go through, if I come across an asset (resource/site/service) I mark it (not used in score because those can be found easily later), same with valuable to me, or significant (changed perspective, therefore would be difficult to just search for)

now that you can see what information is flowing in , what its fulfilling, and they scored against each other -- sore apples will fall out of our list rapidly (reddit and such would never survive...) and when you find some new feed, new resource, within a week or so you start seeing how it compares.

works for me, great results.
Quality > Quantity.

Big Quantity of Quality > Small Quantity of Quality
And the offspring are, expect in the case of adoption, in the same socioeconomic class as the parents.
Trains are not for trips like Philly to Austin. They are for trips between Houston, Austin, and Dallas. In those trips, there is significant overhead to air travel: the time it takes to go to the airport + go through security + take off + climb thousands of feet + descend + land + get your baggage + drive from the airport into the city. The cost to fly these short trips is disproportionate to their distance when compared to longer trips. That is why so most people drive instead.

With trains, you reduce/eliminate almost all of that overhead. If you have a train that goes only 120mph between Houston and Austin, you have reduced the travel time from 3.5-4 hours to 1.5 hours each way. That is a huge savings in time that makes a lot of currently-infeasible trips practical.

Will it be cheap? Based on my experience riding the trains in Japan, I would say it is going to be much cheaper than flying and more expensive than taking buses and/or slower passenger trains. If the high-speed train people were smart, they'd price it at exactly the price of driving (gas-wise) in the beginning in order to build demand, and then ramp up the price as trains start getting sold out.
Good point re: Youtube, but the fact that eBay thinks they can spin Skype off into an independent company implies that it's profitable or near to it.

edit: A little digging confirms it -- http://www.pehub.com/37158/is-skype-profitable-now-we-know-y...
Did you read the part of the article where it mentioned the groups that want us to spend money on barely-faster-than-driving trains?
You are arguing against something that no one is proposing. Cross-country rail trips rarely make sense. Short haul high speed rail trips are faster than plane flights (plus security, baggage checking, commuting to and from far-flung airports, etc) and pollute less. You're complaining about a $500 trip that no one is going to take. Try comparing Acela trips with flights between those cities.

High speed rail corridors designated by the Federal Railroad Administration: http://www.fra.dot.gov/us/content/203

(One important caveat to that map is that there's no way high speed rail will come to Texas without connecting Houston and Dallas, probably like this: http://www.thsrtc.com/)
Even though I haven't used Perl in years, it still has a special place in my heart. Based on your enthusiasm of Catalyst, I may give it a whirl in the next six months.
Turing did in fact consider this possibility, and he instinctively knew that a machine that allowed interactions would be more powerful, but he couldn't prove it.
I'm glad they're improving their situation.

But it can't work here. Are you going to be satisfied when your spouse or child is seriously ill, if you can only talk to a doctor by telephone, and no specialist ever even examines the patient?
The quote is from Augustine's City of God, originally, and it referred to Alexander the Great as the emperor.
Ancient ecosystem thrives millions of years below Antarctic glacier
Is Long-Term Solitary Confinement Torture? - Atul Gawande
HotCocoa API in MacRuby
Well, there goes the last reason to bother with mongrels + monit. There was a discussion here a week or two ago where someone was asking about best Rails deployment - the recommendations pretty much came down to Passenger + Apache for ease, or Nginx + mongrels for speed / low memory use.

This is the best of both worlds and pretty much puts Passenger at the top of any deployment best practise list. Well done to them.
No one is proposing high speed rail for the sparse parts of the country.

http://www.fra.dot.gov/us/content/203
i doubt they'll do it, competition helps them grow
This is great to see. I've been curious about trying Passenger, but am addicted to Nginx. Looking forward to playing around, and if the fit is right, deploying with it.
"...one of the founding geniuses of this new computer technology..."
Is it just me, or does a "college is obsolete/failing/just plain sucks" article hit HN about once every week or two? And most tend to assume the target industry will be IT or web-based, ignoring fields like engineering or non-computer science where it's much more difficult to do online-only learning.

This instance of the college rant does make one interesting point about online interconnectedness as a useful way to bypass credentials. References and personal connections are certainly becoming more important as connectedness is easier to achieve online, and small professional communities become more tight-knit. I'm not sure how much effect this will have on credentials, but I do think it will dilute the networking advantage of highly ranked schools.
Oh I am with icefox. Proof: when asking for code submitted from people without public open source credentials, people will actually send in uncommented code!! I mean there are two issues here - knowing the right thing to do and being too sloppy to do it, and not even realising what the right thing to do is. shake head

As to the OP - if a company doesn't value your O/S contributions, and if those contributions are indeed valuable according to your O/S peers, just don't work for that company. Do you want to have a career with people who can't reliably judge good code?
yes, they should get rid of it.
Really? I only ever thought of IQ as a measurement of elitism, not intelligence. I've met some really smart guys with IQs much lower than you'd expect, and dealt with some really stupid higher IQ folk.
Black Hat 'supertalk' halted due to vendor concerns
That was basically it. I knew I would start to see traffic on a certain port when the service was restored.
I've been thinking about the boat life, too.

I'd definitely buy it -- and don't give it away. Your time and experience is worth money and even though I'm a heavy HN reader, I'll gladly trade my money for it.
It doesn't seem evil to me at all, it is exactly what I would expect.

a = 1
for a in 1..2
b = a
end
p a
>> 2

It seems natural that that would change the value of "a", I wouldn't expect a for loop to create a new scoping context. The example with putting a closure into the array is also what I would expect.

I am not sure what programming language has the scoping rules he expects, but for me there's nothing to see here, moving along...
data says parent IQ is highly correlated with offspring IQ

What's the significance of that in relation to the book review submitted here?
Author of the article here - as the post states, the mortgage figures include other items too, not just the mortgage. The figures include: Council tax, contents insurance, buildings insurance, all utility bills (including phone/internet & mobile phones), TV licence etc. etc.

We recently came back to the UK for a few months and had to go through all this setting up of bills etc. again and were shocked at how much all the extras add up, which you just don't get when you live overseas in furnished rental apartments. I think many people would be shocked if they added up all these extra little bits too.
Twitter Launches Sign in with Twitter
The best way to do it is to have regional train networks, and use planes for inter-region travel. For example you would have train networks like L.A.- S.F., Chicago-Minneapolis, Chicago-St. Louis, Austin-Houston-Dallas-San Antonio, N.Y.C.-Boston-D.C., etc.

Unfortunately, that won't work politically. It basically treats red states like oceans that should be flown over, and puts all the high-speed rail in blue states (except the Texas network). It is probably more fiscally responsible to finance these networks at the state level than at the federal level.
That's still too big for me (while being too small to effectively type on). My G1 is really close, and except for lacking a telephony component, the OQO is nearly spot on.
The business we run whilst we're doing this pulls in more than enough to support the outgoings; whilst it's not easy to set up a business that does this, it is more achievable than many people think.
If you go this route (and you definitely should) be sure to get yourself hired through your startup, so you can use your old company's logo and a quote from your boss on your PR page.
Would you have more confidence if it was going through the Kindle store? That way only amazon has your cc#, and I'm guessing they might have it already.
New York Times cuts sections to save money
Amtrak's Acela is sometimes (regularly?) profitable. It is all the low-speed routes where it loses money.
Their definition of proficiency has more to do with logic and reasoning "comparing two editorials" etc. than reading. Ridiculous. http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/perf_levels.asp
I certainly hope that somebody publishes any adoption studies of twins several decades ago and several other studies replicate the results, so we'll know if you made a relevant point.
Check your facts. The UN has data here:

http://globalis.gvu.unu.edu/indicator.cfm?IndicatorID=30&...

The urban population in the US is 80% of the total. In Canada, it's 81%. Interestingly, Australia is near the top of the list (92%).
Oprah’s First Tweet Will Be Tomorrow On Her Show. Soccer Moms To Take Over The Service?
That a better way to raise average IQ is to encourage smart people to breed?
Would love just a little more detail on the mechanics of doing that.
The problem is that environment really does matter.

I worked from Thailand for three months on Koh Tao, had a great experience and learned a lot, but at the end of the day sketchy wireless + drunk spring breakers really put a damper on things. In Argentina everyone I knew was supportive of what I was working on, and all my friends always wanted to know what was up, take me out to grab drinks at a tango club, go to a drum concert on Monday evenings- my environment made it frictionless to work on a

startup.
(obligatory pictures: http://www.flickr.com/photos/copla201)

Being in Thailand on the island of Koh Tao, though, had the downside that 70% of the population turned over every couple of weeks, and the people that live there are there to escape from the world. Now, I completely respect that- if you're choosing between a 9-5 and scuba instructor on a beautiful Thai island, easy choice. And there's a lot of cool people who make that decision- however, those aren't the same people who are gung-ho on building a great business, or necessarily think that doing so is a worthwhile undertaking. It was an environment where just going to work was an exercise in friction.

That doesn't mean that I didn't head out to the cafe to make progress every day, or get to read up on the topics that allow me to build what I build today from the gorgeous Echo Bar, but it does mean that the environment wasn't conducive to building a startup. I saved money, I had some great experiences, and I wouldn't take it back, if only for the learning experience- environment matters.

Yes, you can work from anywhere, but that doesn't mean you should. However, as I write this I'm packing up my things to move to Budapest on Sunday- my co-founder is Hungarian and after working together online for seven months we're going to push to launch working in-person. The difference between Budapest and Koh Tao is that in Budapest there's already a support network in place- all the friends of my co-founder's who have already supported us at every turn. And it's that support network that's so crucial when building a startup.

It's ok to take on the world, I wouldn't work on anything that didn't take on the world, but you damn well need to have an effective environment to work in when you move halfway across the world.
I was wary too... then in the space of about ten minutes, I had Apache and Passenger set up and I never had to worry about babysitting my Rails apps again.

I can't wait to try Passenger on Nginx.
I think this can apply to drug prevention strategies as well:

DARE - to teach kids about drugs.
Wheras books and newspapers are all completely true? Anybody can say or publish anything they want - in this sense the internet is an extension of the nonternet world, not a contrast to it.

That is, her main point is irrelevant. The internet may not improve on this, but it's not unbearably worse either.
300,000 Kindle 2s Sold To Date
the blog is now readable, had readers only by mistake
Writing Physics
À la 1984. I was thrown out without notice or trial. I was forbidden to go back, so I couldn't talk to anyone.
The Information ecology of social media and online communities
Will you trade for equity in startups that were not accepted into YC? We'll be moving to SF in May and launching sometime end of May/early June.
Especially given the fact that all of those MagLev claims went up in smoke...
This is pretty easy: switch from employment to 1099 contracting. Get a master services agreement in place with its own IP clause, which ensures you own your own product, services, and methodology work. An MSA should also establish your ability to subcontract work, or substitute any of your employees for yourself on projects.

Then get an up-front commit on a couple months worth of work.

You have now set yourself on a course to bootstrap the company off consulting work. Total win.
I would have confidence you aren't stealing my cc#. Not sure I'd have confidence about the quality of the book. Then again, if the cost was along the lines of $3 (vs $20 for a normal book), I'd be more willing to chance it.
But if you had a computer that had enough I/O bandwidth to be able to read all the sensors in one clock cycle, and enough CPU power to be able to run the computation on those readings in one clock cycle, you'd have a computer that was capable of performing the computation optimally. When you add more sensors to the configuration or you have a new computation that is too complex for this computer to solve in one clock cycle, then the computer can no longer be capable of solving that computational problem as stated. Obviously, you can change the problem to make it acceptable to sample instead as you mentioned.
If I'm understanding the principle in question and Mr. Akl's result, he states that the number of computations required to solve a problem is unbounded. If the definition of a universal computer is that the memory and run time is infinite, but the number of computations performed per time slice must be bounded, then there will always be a problem that a realized universal computer cannot solve.

A comment up this thread states that it is silly to have a restriction that all the data must be processable in one time slice because you can just buffer it. I'm not aware of any buffering solution that does not require additional computation to read the value and store it in the buffer.

In his short list of misconceptions and responses, I think that #3 is closest to this argument. I don't know if it would be an absolute requirement that the initial collection of the data must remain an intrinsic part of the universal computer as opposed to the simpler definition that the observed data required for solving the problem must simply be supplied to the computer.

I think I'd lean toward the latter definition because it doesn't seem right to me to expect the universal computer to be responsible for both observing and recording every event in the universe as opposed to just expecting it to be able to perform a calculation on any given set of observed events.
Yeah, there's certainly a lot of buzz around iPhone apps these days...probably more than is warranted in many cases.

As for saving password, I think Mobile Safari doesn't add passwords to the keychain (I may be wrong). Also, I've noticed that switching networks (wifi to 3G, or 3G in one area to a different 3G tower) tends to mess up any sessions I have in web apps. But I haven't really looked into it enough to figure it out.
If you don't want an eBook there are plenty of dead trees on the subject already, eg.

http://www.amazon.com/Essentials-Living-Aboard-Boat/dp/09398...

If you are not in the US it is worth getting one from the country you live in so it will address local concerns and regulations.
The fact that people use colleges as a source of credentialism doesn't actually change the structure of classes themselves. So, to claim that colleges are obsolete because of the futility of using the knowledge of which one a person graduated from as a shortcut for actually assessing their value to your enterprise isn't effective...well, that just doesn't make follow. Maybe credentialism is practiced too much, but surely there is more to college than that. A well structured school will ensure that you learn something in the process of achieving that credential.
Ruby has block local scoping.

It's not the case where you set a beforehand that matters, but when you don't.

For example:

>> (1..2).each { |i| p i }
1
2
=> 1..2
>> i
NameError: undefined local variable or method `i'

>> for i in 1..2; p i; end
1
2
=> 1..2
>> i
=> 2

So the real danger comes in here:

>> procs = []
=> []
>> (1..2).each { |i| procs << lambda { i } }
=> 1..2
>> procs.map { |e| e.call }
=> [1, 2]
>> procs2 = []
=> []

>> for i in 1..2; procs2 << lambda { i }; end
=> 1..2
>> procs2.map { |e| e.call }
=> [2, 2]

Which seems better to you?

If you're not coming from Ruby, I can understand how reading the first part of this entry might make you think "what's the big deal", but if you read on, you'll see an extended version of what I've shown above.

It's the closures that make this issue complicated.
This doesn't seem like a win to me. Interface Builder is not something I want to avoid when building Cocoa apps; it's more like the reason I'd want to build a Cocoa app, rather than a wx or Swing app.
Would be funny if twitter went down during the show
Thanks for the link to the map. It looks pretty wonky to me. As you mentioned, Houston isn't connected to Dallas (or Austin or San Antonio). A huge portion of the proposed track is in southern states where there isn't a lot of wealth. Do the people who drew that map expect those routes to break even?

I'd love to see them re-draw that map color-coded to predicted profitability as a way of prioritizing the work. Also, we need to look at how much money we can get from private investors. For example, I bet L.A.-Las Vegas can be built a lot more profitably (for the U.S. government) than Little Rock to New Orleans.
I don't personally change DNS records on the go (much), but I find having a very quick way to reboot a box that's hanging to be extremely helpful.
I wonder if it's different working as a designer vs. working as a developer. Porn sites are kinda known for sometimes having shoddy design. Also working on the graphics side of things it's a lot more directly related to the porn. On the flip side, developing perl for a porn video site probably isn't that much different than developing for youtube or vimeo in terms of technology.
yes

[edit: just to win the inevitable continuation of this argument, yes infinity + 1!!!]
Next time you are bored, read one of these
I just found citeseerx (a citation counter for computer science papers).
I wish i had more time to beef up my CS background knowledge -- I think this might be a good place to start ;)
Except youporn doesn't exactly have the most solid business model, as the article states. You might still be out of a job.
I don't understand what this has to do with MagLev. (And how did it go up in smoke? According to this http://maglev.gemstone.com/status/index.html it seems like it's still being worked on.)
Talking about Twitter in the same breath as YouTube just doesn't make sense - YouTube's troubles stem from the fact that its costs are through the roof, being a streaming video site and all. In order to come out of the red, they have to make a pretty large amount off of each viewer, and that's tough to do when advertising rates are depressed.

Twitter, on the other hand, sends 140 character messages back and forth. Yes, they've had scaling issues, but that's because they blew up from a tiny operation into a major success overnight without the manpower to handle the growth, not an indication that their costs are too high. If they flip pretty much any monetization switch, they'll become profitable quickly.
Excel-Lookalike Twitter Client Helps You Goof Off At Work
Clever in more ways than one. It might also be a good way to understand YC if you're trying to emulate its success.
Is there a difference between this and
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=565409 ??

The URLs are different ...
I know of a similar case where the company continued to pay 75% of the person's salary and health coverage for half-time work. This worked out pretty well.
In places like the SF Bay Area, that's kind of a moot point.
Macromolecular Modeling for Molecular Systems Engineering
So, six months worth of rent is only $9600. I'd be hesitant to give up any amount of equity for such a small sum. YC gives small sums...but not that small, and, of course, YC gives a lot more than money.

Very clever marketing though, and seems like a pretty cool guy with an interesting background. But, I'll point out that it's not hard to find cool people with tech backgrounds to rent housing from here in the valley, if you opt to rent from individuals rather than big apartment mega-complexes. I ended up in a house owned by an early PayPal employee who now helps setup tech conferences; he's been very useful and pleasant to talk to.

Then again, there probably is something to be said for doing this in a made-to-flip company. Spend as little as possible, build as fast as possible, design your life around avoiding hassle during that period, make something great, make as many connections as you can, and get out rich. This would be pretty useful in such a case. A couple points in a company that you hope to sell for high hundreds of thousands or low millions wouldn't be a bad trade at all.
To me the following is highly surprising:

#assuming a is unbound at this point
for a in 1..2
b = 2
end
p a
>> 2

I expect "a" to be free outside the loop in Ruby.