skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interestingly, most Japanese people I know do have their licenses– but do not drive. Money or access to a car isn't the issue either (disclaimer: anecdotal), rather they just don't want to drive. They all got their licenses because they thought a non-driver ID was silly whether or not they were ever going to drive. And that's after going through the standard Japanese driving school which, last time I asked someone, was around 35man (~$3500) at Koyama.

I have yet to find any convincing reasons why this is, but at the very least there are some obvious clues for the average Japanese, including but not limited to: much better public transportation, trains run consistently even in very rural areas, density is high enough and Japan is small enough that younger people don't find driving "worth it", and because walking/biking are easy and encouraged. Biking on the sidewalk is illegal in NY– in Yokohama, it's rare to see a cyclist anywhere but the sidewalk.

As for the US, I have yet to see this trend of non-drivers. Living in the city of course it's the norm not to drive, but coming from the country, everyone I know is stilling willing to go through all the ropes to get their license and whatever they can with wheels because it's about the closest thing to independence you can get in such a rural area. Now I have noticed people being less motivated to go places thanks to more efficient communication as was mentioned above– Facebook obviously, but even before then AIM had just about everyone and their grandmother. I will not be surprised if further down the road there is a noticeable decline in the number of new drivers because of this, but I haven't seen it just yet.

On the money point though, I do think it's a very good thing to bring up when making the generational comparison. I don't really have much to say about it except that when my parents' generation were teenagers, it seemed like everyone could earn the money for a decent (read: popular, not super low-end) car with just a summer job in the country. A suburban job was good enough to enter the low-end muscle/sports car market for some uncles. The late '80s/early '90s generation middle class on the other hand seemed to have two options: take out loans or lease a nice car for your child and hope that they don't wreck it (or beef up your insurance if they do, I suppose) OR, as I'm much more accustomed to, peruse the classifieds until that prized low-mileage foreign auto from past decades finally hits that sweet spot of under $5000 / less than 1sq meter of rust.

...All that being said, there's definitely something to be said for the fact that these days freedom isn't measured in miles attainable, but rather in how much ingenuity, computing power, and free bytes (¡OSS!) you have.
Even the god in the fable you're referencing gave Noah advance notice of the flood.
Thats just tearable.

had to be said
I'd probably want to kill myself if I had to drive through Atlanta more than once a year. I couldn't even imagine driving in/around Atlanta with any regularity.

Edit: I'll add that in all my years of driving, thumbing, and general perusing I don't think I've met a single big rigger who hasn't considered Atlanta to be in or at the top of their five worst places to drive.
Clearly not. (2013 Hacker News comment)
I left Sydney for Tokyo. One of the biggest draws for me was the public transport system. I can't imagine going back to a life where I have to spend a significant chunk of my time doing such a mundane and frustrating task. I haven't lived in a US city, but if the traffic is anything like Sydney, I can certainly understand the appeal of ditching that.
I think you should have written some kind of code that blinked back and forth between tearable and terrible.

:-P
There're plenty of movies that manage to tell deep stories in 1.5 hours. Netflix is a treasure trove when it comes to quality entertainment.
Glad to see I'm not the only one with a low opinion on driving. Every minute I spend behind the wheel I am thinking "I HATE driving!"

I'm currently living in Bellevue, WA so it's not possible to live entirely without a car. My wife and I are planing to move to Seattle though. It seems very walkable and there's a lot of public transit options.
What exactly is so bad about driving there? Just curious :)
Let Me Jira That For You
From stupid people.
I don't want the people who convert after that popup, they are the worst.
Sony Walkman Replacement
A partial reason is zoning laws. Ever play SimCity and notice how an area can be marked residential, commercial or industrial but never a combination?

This essentially forces people and their work to be in different areas, which then means some form of transport between the two.
Eh, maybe, maybe not. Someone replied, suggesting 1 in 88 is a more accurate figure. Ballpark rounding and all, that's nearly 2 in 150. If it accounts for 2-ish miles of that 35 out of 150, that's in the neighborhood of 5%. That sounds like a lot to me for a single condition. Quite a lot.
The House passed it. The Senate might kill it, and Obama also said he would not pass it. But nothing is for sure.
It's a lot harder to learn how to drive once you move out of your parents' and can't borrow their car (and their presence as a licenced tutor), and in rural areas (I grew up in one too), you need a car to get anywhere.

That said, city dwellers can get by for most of their trips with public transit, bicycle, or on foot, and by the time I have kids and am teaching them to drive I fully expect autonomous cars - the current generation may be the last one that learns how to drive themselves.
Curious to learn more as the specifics come out.

I am familiar with pg storm which was using pg FDW with CUDA, it had some pretty severe limitations last I looked, I also remember someone doing a sort implementation on cuda on the mailing list which was pretty slick, Tim Child also did some presentations(I never saw code personally, would love a link if anyone has), that was doing opencl as a procedural option which I think would still be really cool, and potentially easier to deal with as an extension where applicable.

I am going to be very interested to see what is possible with postgres 9.3 writable fdw and potentially something like this. May be that postgis will find its way to similar performance given access to the same tech.

35k loc is compact, cannot wait to see the code!
I used to be really excited by the possibility of driverless cars, but now I think overall they're going to be a wash. They will likely have significant downsides: they make traveling long distance less onerous, so sprawl will increase. They'll likely increase the total miles driven. If we want more compact cities and less pollution, with driverless cars we'd need measures to decrease driving above and beyond what we'd need today.
Detox Diet - The Big Cleanse | How to Lose Weight Fast
The road system is overloaded for a city of its size. There is one big connector type freeway going north and south, and then "The Perimeter" which is a circular freeway encircling the whole metro area. And that's about it for freeways, in a metro area of 5.5 million. The rest of it is very narrow surface roads which follow former livestock paths in a hilly wooded area.
In my mind, the benefit of a driverless car is that you don't need to own one. You can just pay for the right to use one at any given time, then never worry about it otherwise.
Show HN: wiz - makes command-line tools easier to use
These requirements do tend to differ from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Yours is likely rather permissive.
"game" != "toy"

https://www.google.com/search?q=bubble%20wrap%20app%20store&...
Does anybody know of anything like this for Django? I'm very much interested in better integration between client-side and server-side code. I'm really not sold on the client-side MVC paradigm, and I think this sounds like an awesome alternative.
Yeah thats exactly my point, waiting until 19025 to get a license is pretty harsh if you don't live in a big city
Stricken boy’s dream comes true, thanks to clever photographer
Even originally programming won't stop churn entirely.

The originally programming is meant to pull in new subs and keep current subs engaged at higher levels so that they are less likely to churn. If you want to cancel your subscription for whatever reason already, it may not matter if they have 100 original series, you'll still cancel.

It's all about increasing the lifetime value of each subscriber. One way is to keep them longer (e.g. reduce churn). The other is to upsell them to higher pricing tiers. We're not seeing that with the original content (yet), but what if Netflix managed to (for sake of discussion) get the rights to Firefly and made another season of it but only for people who signed up for a new "Premium Streaming" package. You'd see some complaints, but a slew of "Shut up and take my money" memes. I don't know if they'll ever do this, but it's the next logical step once they've established the original content as desirable.
The threads move far too fast in general, to be any physical substance.

Needs a bit of parameter tuning.
Glancing through his comment history, I didn't see a single thing that seemed ban-worthy. It's more a slew of low-quality comments. I have the feeling it was automatic based on number of comments and average score.
Also see: http://haptic-data.com/toxiclibsjs/
Hi all, MapD creator here - I'd be happy to answer any questions. The 700K figure was done by rendering polygon files to textures and using them as lookup tables - it ran pretty fast on the CPU so its not all the GPU there. However if a point falls on a border - perhaps 1% of cases for say a medium-sized raster of the US - you have to do a geometric lookup as usual - which I didn't benchmark. Probably better would be to do some tiled implementation - basically something like textured quad-trees.

And as I told the journalist I wasn't sure if I did the PostGIS indexing right - I feel like the quote got taken a little out of context - but the speedups were "high" to "quite high" regardless.
flash, but here you go: http://www.virtual-bubblewrap.com/bubble-wrap.swf
The Power Of Silence: Why The SimCity Story Went Away
I don't understand the "driving sucks, regardless of circumstances" mentality. Automobiles increase quality of life, along with practical range.

"My wife doesn't even have a license anymore. It's incredibly liberating."
Really?

"I seriously wanted to kill people."
Really?
Exactly like DC.
(MapD creator again) - Also, check out http://worldmap.harvard.edu/tweetmap for a live demo - even though its been a bit buggy under Slashdot load and I had to disable GetFeatureInfo requests (i.e. click to get tweet). Also see here for a demo of a new interface I'm messing with that does animation - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Foo8pYbSPv4 .
The right thing for me to tell you is that you should give up.

Why is this the right thing? Because a bunch of people are going to tell you that you are crazy over the next few years if you decide to try it. So you may as well hear it now from me and decide that you are going to do it anyway. Or just take my advice and give up now.

I'm currently tackling a multi-billion dollar market. It's pretty scary. I have my doubts every other week. But I think it's on the right side of crazy. We've identified several niches within the market that we think we have a good shot of being able to penetrate. These are $100+ million markets of varying competitiveness that are related to the competitive market. Once we've got a foothold there, we're going to try to start penetrating a few different segments of the competitive market. And then execute like crazy.

So we're not banking on our ability to penetrate the highly competitive market. Our competition has more money, people and better brand recognition.

But you can't step up to the plate and be afraid of the ball. You've got to try to hit a nice solid home run over the fence. You aren't going to build a google, groupon, airbnb or dropbox without competition.

I'm in it for the long haul. I've got a ton of room to pivot because it is a vast market. I've got a few different aspects that might become successful. I like my chances.

Startup school had a presentation last year i think that discussed startups in a land grab situation vs startups with entrenched players. I would start there. Build. And look for the right team.

I hope the idea is good enough to justify the next five years of your life working on it. Because that is what you are looking at doing.
+1 on this. First time I hear about HBO Go (yeay for USA only web service - like Hulu). Netflix on the other hand is competing with Love Film over here.
A Conversation with Elon Musk (Khan Academy)
Downfall of Distributed Startups
Is it just me or is "Compression Ratio" a poor label for the graph in that article? Normally, when one uses "Compression Ratio", it is the opposite of those numbers, i.e. EXT3 storage would be 1:1, ZFS-LZJB would be 2:1 (not 0.5), and ZFS-gzip would be 3.33:1 (not 0.3). It's a small thing I know but it turns convention on its head in its current form. A better label would be perhaps "Storage Size Ratio".
Code-Warrior: Practice Algorithm in your own editor
Advice on writing. Famous authors and their advices on creative writing
Something tells me they are running their own LBs now.
Younger Americans are eating less meat because the USA is slowly progressing toward vegetarianism and away from the horrors of factory farming. There is plenty of cheap low-quality meat available.
From what I gather, it is worse than DC. Atlanta grew/spread in a manner unprecedented in known human history. It is not up against a natural barrier like the coast or an artificial barrier like a state border. It is pretty horrible.
I'm in the same boat - I'm in a city of a half million, and I own a car, but it's a decade old, and I only use it 1) evenings and weekends when the bus doesn't run as often, 2) when I want to move heavy and/or large items, or 3) when I travel out of town. Between those I only put about 10-15,000 km on my car in a year, and at least a third of that is cross-country road trips to visit my family.
Microsoft's Blue: What will developers do?
Chartio is is hiring UI developers for data vis
I didn't change any settings in Visual Studio after installing on my Surface Pro and everything looks fine to me. I'm embarrassed to admit that I really haven't peeked into what's going on with the DPI settings (because how it came out of the box has been perfectly fine for 99% of what I've been running on it), but I believe it's set at 150% DPI and VS respects that throughout.
It's funny (sad) that SimCity, which was created with an intentional undercurrent of liberal manipulation public opinion regarding urban planning, missed the boat so badly on that topic. It wasn't just an oversimplified game mechanic.
Exposed: A Blog Comment Spammer's Source Template
Whenever I visit Redmond, I always stay in Bellevue without a car. I know, this doesn't really count, but Metro + Microsoft shuttles are enough for a visit of a month or so. Of course, if I lived there for real, I would live in Seattle (I didn't have a car for 4 years while at UW either, but that's different!).
You are conveniently ignoring iPad.
How to maximize your closet
CALL FOR PAPERS - The Hackers Conference 2013
Try driving in Beijing...I outsource to a taxi daily.
ASD wasn't created in the past 20 years, it has just seen a great increase in diagnosis.
Hopefully these metrics are not "news" to any "hackers" on HN.

1. Bounce% & time on page
2. CPA (cost per acquisition)
3. Growth

But of course this is a broad solution, and your startup will care about different metrics.

If I'm Google, and I run PPC in search engines, my "time viewing an ad" is far less useful/important of a metric than a simple click through rate.
What of being woken several times each night? I have two kids and two dogs and a wife; between them all I'm woken at least twice.
Thank you for the great advice. I really the like the Google Alerts idea.

I'm definitely treating this more as a learning experience. It started out as a project for learning iOS development and has become a project for learning to market a niche app. But I'm also wondering if I can turn it into a project for learning how to delegate the marketing side of things to someone who understands and enjoys it, since even though I thoroughly grasp its importance, I find it tedious compared to development work and have a hard time motivating myself to put in the time required vs. say starting to build another app.
It appears from the graphs (yeah, I know) that he's probably doing trig (to locate the tweet) and collision detection (to determine the area of the city). He could also have more control over single precision algorithm choice than he would have via his original solution. It could be something as simple as pre-calculating the geolocation with a parallel CUDA kernel during ETL into PostGIS and bypassing its index generation.

I also have an itchy feeling that there may have been some confusion regarding conversions between "times" and "percent", possibly multiple times. [1]

Extrapolating that an iterative solution would take 40 days, without running it for 40 days, is tricky as well. Given multiple tweets in close proximity, PostGIS should benefit from caching the R-tree index.

I'm not assuming the inventor is doing these things, as his db prof was impressed, as well as CSAIL and the body awarding his prize. [2] I think, if anything, the reporting is intended to be high-level enough to have more broad appeal, which makes it more difficult for us to evaluate the results in a Gedankenversuch. "Reduce slowness here..."

[1] The sidebar says,'Some statistical algorithms run 70 times faster compared to CPU-based systems like MapReduce,' while the quote in the article says,'“The speed ups over PostGIS … I’m not an expert, and I’m sure I could have been more efficient in setting up the system in the first place, but it was 700,000 times faster,” Mostak said. “Something that would take 40 days was done in less than a second.”'

[2] Hey, logical fallacies do not necessarily mean the argument is wrong!
AFAIK IPv6 originally became a RFC back in 1995.
Old people vote, and tend to have more effective lobbying groups than young people do. Those under 18, in particular cannot vote, and those just over often don't.

On a possibly related note: nobody I've voted for for Federal office has ever won that office. I don't know enough about the relevant theory to say what effect that might have on how hard a politician should go after my vote, but it seems noteworthy.
Hi - MapD creator - I love Postgres/PostGIS and use them all the time - there are just some things that are going to execute fast in parallel with high-memory bandwidth. And then there is the algorithm - see my post above for an explanation.
I actually drive as little as possible, but my wife doesn't drive, so I have to take her to places sometimes. We have a kid also, and there are things that are just too inconvenient to do without a car.

But you're right, the MS shuttles are really great for getting around.
I am trying to win an online pinboard on Lucky Magazine's page in an effort to drive more traffic to my startup, JoydeJewels.com

Vote for me and help me get to the top of the page.

I know - why am i posting this here? Because most chicks who blog are usually a lot more fashion-minded than I am, and also a lot less of a geek than I am. Why not help out a geeky girl in her quest to earn more traffic to her site?

Thanks so much!
> Biking on the sidewalk is illegal in NY– in Yokohama, it's rare to see a cyclist anywhere but the sidewalk.

Japan is like Germany in that cyclists are supposed to use the sidewalk and not the street (which I believe is actually illegal). I actually prefer using the street as cars don't get in my way as much as pedestrians do. But the city I live in now (Beijing), it doesn't matter, both cars, bikes, and pedestrians use the streets, sidewalks, bike lanes....suffice it to say I don't bike but rollerblade on the street instead.
The man who goes alone can also slip on a mossy rock and slowly starve to death in a ravine with a broken leg.
Fixed both...
thanks... :)
Well, I actually wrote a simple email backup app called http://thehorcrux.com/ for individuals. It was my own personal itch.

</shamelessplug>
Minuum Keyboard Finishes Indiegogo Campaign With 873% Of Goal, Beta Coming June
Does HN have any good picks from this list?

I see a lot of out of print books and books not about programming/software development, so if there are any that someone could recommend from this massive list I'd appreciate that.
For Firefox: "Remove it Permanently" (RIP) plug-in.

I also use it to nuke the more aggravating social, pandering, and similar sections of websites.
I don't see a problem with them expressing the ratio as a decimal since it becomes a simple multiplier of the original file size 38GB x 0.3.

But it's downright misleading to show the vertical axis from something other than 0.0 to 1.0 when comparing ratios. They start it at 0.2. In reality, LZJB is saving 50% of the space whereas gzip saves 70%. But a naive glance at the graph implies gzip look roughly 3 times smaller/better than LZJB.

Classic "How to Lie with Statistics" stuff.* I would have expected better from an "analytics" database.

* Not saying they intend to lie here but it's representative of the classic text https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Lie_with_Statistics
I have different modes of working, and switch between them depending on the context.

When I wish to learn something new, I choose a new technology stack. I read a lot about it, and try my best to code in an idiomatic and clean style for that tech. I might have a couple of iterations right from the start, where I just want to get something to work, and then change it to be clean.

Then there is the kata-mode, where I do something that is familiar to me, but just try to do it better than before. Just to improve my existing skill set when I don't have the energy to do something new.

Then there is the project mode where I got to get paid. This is where the shortcuts are made. When I have time, I will code a version that works with some planning; and I'm talking at micro level, macro level planning has been done already. Then I commit it. And then I refactor it, if I'm happy, I will amend the previous commit. But when the pressure gets higher and there is just no time, the second step is dropped. This is where the technical debt starts accumulating, but at least it works and the project progresses. The first moment I get more time, I try to do some refactoring, but at this point, there never is time or reason to fix all those TODO's and broken windows.

It's a balancing act for me; and at work I have seen both extremities of this balance. And those who are the most experienced, can switch between different modes depending on the deadline; and I see that as one of the most important skills to have in our craft.
I had thought about this a few months back when I realized I have a box with 32gb RAM and all it does it host my VM's for internal compiling, testing....

Mount all the VM's drives from my MacBook Pro to copy files to them, VNC/ssh in to each to do the work.