skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Amtrak can't even cover it's operating costs with it's (much more expensive) ticket. Amtrak's operating expenses are dominated by headcount costs.

Amtrak is obviously not a model of efficiency, but it's certainly a valid data point about the scale of operating costs we're talking about.

The $20 ticket is a myth. The only way anyone pays $20 to ride this thing is if the taxpayers take up the other $140 of slack.
[slightly further OT]
don't thank Google or Trimble for SketchUp. Both have done hardly anything with it since purchasing it from the few small developers who originally built it (I believe they were ex autodesk).
Does that page include the whitehat programme TOS, or is it just the general TOS?
Whether you consume or create with a computer is only passingly related to the runtime the applications run in; the real differentiating factor is how you use it. It's immaterial that Javascript is well supported or not on Android or iOS; what's material is how software evolves under the interface constraints.

A computer could live entirely inside a web browser and be useless for creation; just as a computer could have no web browser at all and be a content creator's dream.

There are plenty of arguments for the Javascript/DOM/&c. stack as an application framework -- that they're somehow more better at creation isn't one of them.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-collap...
Although some politicians generate terrorism fears for political advantages, the media report it for ratings. Think about all the "innocent white girl kidnapped" headlines. The media reports what people will tune in to and people will definitely tune in for that.

So what, do we place limits on reporting?
The Pebble Beach Of The Caribbean? Puerto Rico's Great New Golf Resort
It's a in a cylinder. On curves, the acceleration would tilt the cars sideways and acceleration would be, from the viewpoint of a rider, down towards the floor, like gravity (like when a plane banks). Unlike a banking plane, you would maintain vertical acceleration down and have even less weird accelerations than you would in that instance. Your head would experience less jerking around than you would in a fast car ride.
It's interesting how, in terms of door-to-door transit time, the extreme speed of the Musk plan is a liability; it basically ensures the system can't connect city centers.

I read a post last week that compared the situation to the Shinkansen, which was an expensive political show project until they figured out how to get it to population centers.
It is all PR at this point. Snowden really should study the art of PR in depth. I'm not thinking he is doing a terrible job with his limited contact with the press so far, but more education in the PR area wouldn't hurt. To do PR right, you need to pick your message and stay on it.

I think what the average person may not grasp about Snowden is that he is a true patriot, who truly loves his country, in a way far beyond the average American. I mean, he basically risked spend the rest of his life in some prison to publicize what he viewed as the government invading privacy in gross violation of the 4th amendment to the constitution. Would any of us risk spending the rest of our life in prison to bring that to light if we were in his position? Not likely, and it is because we don't have the same level of love for our country as he has.

Snowden needs to really focus his PR people and efforts on that simple message, that he acted out of love for his country. It is a simple message. Otherwise, he risks being painted as an out of control punk, or whatever.
the downside of stateless portscanning is that you are trading speed for false negatives

That's interesting. Could you explain this in a bit more detail? Unless I missed it, the thread from yesterday didn't discuss this.
You could create a much more leveraged position with options. With a put option buy, your maximum loss is capped, so you wouldn't need any additional margin.
Don't underestimate the threat from furniture.

It happened to me: one moment I was sitting at the table in my IKEA chair, perhaps leaning forward to browse HN, and the next I was on the floor with (the mirror revealed) a deep 20-inch gash across my upper back, and a lighter slash behind my knees/legs.

Obviously the chair broke, but I still haven't figured out how it cut me so severely. A few inches higher and it would have been my neck.
Yes, early footy games sold really well. My next project at Codemasters in 1987 was going to be a soccer game, but then stuff happened and I moved over to the business side. Pete Williamson wrote a series of four mini games instead, called Four Soccer Simulators, which sold very well. It was quite hard to do a convincing 11-a-side game at the time, with the hardware constraints on 8-bit machines. A young Ted Carron managed to get that side of things working really well, but in a rugby game. He then moved on to a super-secret project which became the Game Genie, so didn't get a crack at footy either. There were many about though, and they were regarded as money in the bank if you published one. Fact was, though, it was really hard to find devs that understood or were passionate about the game. Most self-taught programmers back then learned their craft at the expense of time spent outside kicking a ball, I suspect.
I prefer scrolling, because I already have my fingers ready to scroll. Do you find it hard to see when the comments indent back to the left edge when scrolling quickly? It's something that old-school programmers have a lot of practice doing. Perhaps a slightly increased visual cue would help?
For the record, last I heard, Amtrak is actually incredibly profitable in the northeast and almost profitable along the west coast. It's the losses from running the rest of the system that kill it.
I'm not a "fan" of the democrats, as I said, if we had a viable multi-party system I'd much more often be voting green, with democrats as my second choice, so that a losing green vote isn't a winning republican vote. But as it stands, there is no way to vote for a "first and second choice".

Also, as we went to war in Iraq because the MSM, including the new york times, as well as congress, went along with the republicans, so you can't generalize that a certain combination of R/D leads to the most checks and balances via the government or the media. The democrats in congress rubber stamped a whole set of republican policies - the democrats are a terrible opposition party since they offer so little of it. Checks and balances are essentially working terribly (we currently have 100% obstruction for almost all issues, then for this one we have too little) and no R/D pattern will fix that, only changes to the rules including voting (compulsory, allow second choices) and campaign finance (there should be almost no finance in campaigns) will change that.
WhatKind of Genius are You? (Wired, 2006)
OpenJDK?
WOW!! 8 people filled this up in 11 minutes. Thanks people but i still need around 20 more to complete 500 mark. Thanks a lot again..
Yeah, and he breaks their terms of service even there, since you're only supposed to create a single personal account under your true name.
Oh, and just to clarify, I'm not coming at this from the perspective of "BigCo hatred". It is in Facebook's best interests to treat white hat reported security issues seriously, even if they don't initially understand them.

What are the chances that this security researcher ever reports another bug to Facebook, given how he was treated? Selling future exploits to spammers wouldn't be the ethical thing to do, but if I know "Emrakul" in Facebook Security is just going to tell me to F-off, I start to justify it.....
I would highly recommend "The Emperor of All Maladies" for anyone seeking a more solid understanding of cancer. I really didn't know much about cancer and treatments until reading this book, and now I feel like I at least have a general understanding. I read it after a family friend succumbed to cancer and I realized that I knew very little about the entire disease.

My take away at the end of the book was that for all of the "war on cancer" hyperbole going back to the 50s, up until the mid-90s, we just didn't know enough about cancer to really be fighting it. I feel a lot more optimistic about the next 50 years of cancer research than the previous 50.

http://www.amazon.com/Emperor-All-Maladies-Biography-Cancer/... (non-affliate link)
The US health care system can use
improvements, but the improvements
will not be easy to implement in practice,
and there is a risk of "doing harm".

If ObamaCare is a good design for
the US health care system or can
be morphed into such a design, then
Obama, Pelosi, Reid, the Senator
Kennedy staffers who wrote an early
version, etc. will deserve credit.

My
guess (from reading some of
an earlier bill)
is that as passed it was a
steaming pile of sewage, to mess up
the US health care system and kill people
and waste money,
but eventually
it may get turned into something good
as implemented in the Executive Branch.

I do fear the influence of
Dr. Karen Davis and her academic,
economic, health care systems research
nonsense -- I've been too close to such
nonsense.

There are major suggestions, e.g.,
from Barney Frank, that ObamaCare is
just a step to 'single payer' and,
with the power of the Commissioner,
really just nationalization of the
US health care industry, a huge
fraction of the US economy. I'm
very afraid of the consequences
in health care quality, cost,
and abuses of government power.

I know; I know; the US health care
system is a very long way from free
enterprise now. NIH pays for a
huge fraction of the medical research.
Likely, as elsewhere in Federal Government
research grants, the research supports
the 'research-teaching' hospitals that
do so much for patients, and poor patients,
training physicians, and doing medical
research. The FDA is right on top of
each new product. The CDC plays a
major role in US health care. The Hill
Burton hospitals admit anyone regardless
of ability to pay. Many hospitals
are funded by city taxes. Etc.

Improvement: Needed? Yes. Possible?
Maybe. Easy? No. A mess? Easy!

Yes, Obama has supported ObamaCare, but
actually he showed that he knows next
to nothing about the issue, e.g.,
during the summer of the big debate
made some uninformed
town hall statements and
got
slapped down hard by the US College
of Surgeons and then mostly just
shut up about the details.

I suspect that ObamaCare will be
put on a back burner, maybe
become just a subsidized insurance
plan, and otherwise junked, a little
after Obama leaves office.
Groupon Suspends Sales Rep While It Investigates Yelp Review Threat
Here's a mathematician's skeptical take on this issue (just CMD-F "jerk").
If you mean companies we've funded, you can reach them by emailing them individually or by coming to Demo Day. Unfortunately the next Demo Day (on tuesday) is already full. But there will be another in March.
Great find! I didn't know this existed. However, I still think having this as a default feature would benefit the community and the quality of discussions.
Focus: Transcranial direct current stimulation for gamers
the math in this article is wrong, they are comparing the "capacity" of the CHSR. There is no way the CHSR is going to be operating at capacity. Operating at 10% is a more likely scenario. Moreover, direct from LA to SF is a feature, not a bug. I might take the CHSR IF it only went between the two cities, having extra stops makes it LESS likely that I will use it (currently at zero likelihood; I'd rather just take a plane).
This is fantastic; I recently got into wood working, and I love the spirit of having open source furniture.
Just one in the 45 minutes quoted. It's still impressive.
What fraction of "conventional" public transport costs are labour?

I think (if it gets built!) we'll see very few humans operating or maintaining the hyperloop.
Stop for a second and think why would abstract "richer group" ask for it and how would abstract "poorer group" prevent this from happening?

E.g. if the "richer group" got rich not via favors from monopoly of violence, but from efficiently servicing "poorer group", why would they risk massive boycotts and end of well-running business for a short-term benefit? Imagine if Amazon suddenly decides to print books using blood of cute little kittens because it's slightly more profitable. Would they think twice whether customers would be eager to buy those books?

Or you'd prefer a mythically benevolent all-powerful organization with guns, nukes and tons of paperwork that will create an appearance of "protection of piece and order" which you will never be able to control or affect?
I would like to present a very good counter argument put forth by Taleb on his Facebook page:

"""
(Heuristic: go to Pinker). He promotes there a WSJ article to the effect that "Terrorism kills far fewer people than falls from ladders"; the article was written by a war correspondant, Ted Koppel and is very similar to his Angels thesis.

Now let's try a bullshit-detecting probabilistic reasoning.

A- Falls from ladder are thin-tailed, and the estimate based on past observations should hold for the next year with an astonishing accuracy. They are subjected to strong bounds, etc. It is "impossible" to have, say, >1% of a country's population dying from falls from ladders the same year. The chances are less than 1 in several trillion trillion trillion years. Hence a journalistic statement about risk converges to the scientific statement.

B- Terrorism is fat tailed. Your estimation from past data has monstrous errors. A record of the people who died last few years has very very little predictive powers of how many will die the next year, and is biased downward. One biological event can decimate the population.

May be "reasonable" to claim that terrorism is overhyped, that our liberty is more valuable, etc. I believe so. But the comparison here is a fallacy and sloppy thinking is dangerous. (Worse, Koppel compares terrorism today to terrorism 100 years ago when a terrorist could inflict very limited harm.)

"""

Another such case is Nuclear Weapons, Millions of dollars are spent on controlling proliferation of nuclear weapons, even when no one died last year because of them. However this does not implies that we should abandon strict controls, since the risk characteristics are completely different.
I better visual cue would be good as well. In huge threads with hundreds or even thousands of comments, it is hard for me to tell where something ends.

I don't think adding the collapsable button takes anything away, but adds a lot of value. Even with the button you can still scroll. :)
First Time there is any public numbers on Topaz, the RPython / PyPy implementation of Ruby.

Note: Only Two benchmarks presented in the Paper, and as with any benchmarks take it with a grain of x.

If it wasn't for JVM Truffle, Topaz is the fastest implementation of Ruby. And by a large margin. Assuming Ruby 2.0 was 5x faster then Ruby 1.8, Topaz is 8-10x faster then Ruby 2.0!

And Truffle is about 1.5-2.5x faster then Topaz.

Now i want to know would there be a better faster FFI for SVM.

And how far are we from seeing release of SVM?
I remember at the time of the Vista launch spending a quiet afternoon going in to donate blood at the Red Cross. They had quite some more donors than they had expected, so there was lots of time to wait. While I waited, I discussed Vista with someone who was clearly a Windows enthusiast. It was also fairly clear that they weren't much of a technologist. I sort of spent the time trying to find the words to encourage him to give it a little time. I was and still am using XP. I have Linux in some VMs. I can see transitioning, but haven't bitten the bullet.

More succinctly, I wonder if you are projecting your doubts a little bit.
you would still be fully wrong in selling the exploit to the highest bidder. It's not ethical to do that just because you failed to get a bounty after reporting it, especially if you only tried once.

Well he tried twice, and they told him it wasn't a bug both times. After that, what's wrong with selling "not an exploit" to the highest bidder?
I needed a rather large test dataset for an aerial imagery basemap, so I went onto USGS's "EarthExplorer" web site [1].

If you need to fetch a lot of data, don't bother trying to download it through the website itself, instead place an order through the "bulk downloader" interface [2]. The order size is limited however, but it was incredibly easy to patch in a simple 'window.setinterval' script through the JS console to make it automatically generate orders from a particular search set.

1: http://earthexplorer.usgs.gov
2: http://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/bulk/help
This is really neat, but seems to neglect an alternative (and just as simple) method. Instead of traversing through each pixel of the source buffer, traverse through each pixel of the destination buffer sampling the correct pixels from the source. Using different sampling methods results in various qualities, and efficiencies in cpu use and memory access.

This method is as simple to code and doesn't suffer from the missing-pixel aliasing problem of the simple method of the article, and is also capable of higher quality results than the shearing method.
Amtrak has a very different business, operating and even physical model. Sure, they're both transportation, but unless there's detail in the specifics we might as well compare the Chinatown bus with renting a Cessna.
It isn't hard to use an optimus card with Debian or most other distros nowadays you just need to install bumblebee (wheezy-backports for debian) with that you get improved battery life.

I personally don't get GPU drivers breaking the computer but I don't use nvidias drivers I use nouveau but I also use Debian so a distro like Arch (which is more prone to packages breaking systems) might be much worse.
Actually, it's the only line in the piece that isn't pretentious. It's a basic truth: if you're unhappy where you are, seek happiness elsewhere. It has double meaning of course; get out of my city because you're spreading unhappiness, and go find your own city where you can find happiness.

I see nothing wrong with it.
From your 1, 2 and 3 "options" in your parent question, 1 is the only doable and worth doing. It's not a multiple choice. That's a first thing to understand.

And controlling the press by "placing limits" is the opposite of democratic. If anything, most of the press is even now too limited in their approach, effectively supporting the interest groups who benefit from having "terror threat."
People willing to exploit insecure sites may be able to scan faster -
legality is a different issue.

http://census2012.sourceforge.net/paper.html

Starting with one device and assuming a scan speed of ten IP addresses
per second, it [the scanner] should find the next open device within one
hour. The scan rate would be doubled if we deployed a scanner to the
newly found device. ... We did this in the least invasive way possible ....

I wonder if/when attaching a widely accessible and easily exploitable
device will be considered illegal (attractive nuisance, negligence,
public nuisance, contribution to a crime)?

To leap to a car analogy, if a driver leaves the keys in a vehicle
ignition, and the vehicle is stolen and used to commit some other crime,
does the driver face criminal penalties or civil liability?

Should a computer vendor or user who neglects to secure their
systems or network face penalties or liability? Should external
entities do wide scans to encourage better security? I think
that a "name and shame" approach aimed at vendors who ship
or install insecure-by-default systems could be effective.
At times I've blurted out that the
most serious problem facing Western Civilization
now is the news media, journalism, that
fails to provide the information
needed by well informed citizens.

My hope is that the Internet will make
the needed information available and that
enough citizens will get and use the
information to get the government
we need to meet the challenges of
our current world.

E.g., the OP points out some of Obama's
superficial nonsense, and we discuss it
here. Much more such activity, and Obama
will have to think twice and talk once,
and we might be on the way to better
government.
Oracle has some additional features and implements more of the geometry operations correctly but is not materially better than PostGIS for many applications and use cases.

Neither platform offers scalability or high throughput so they are largely differentiated on features.
User interest is enough but contributors would be better to raise the bar.

I am specifically looking for someone with JS skills to handle building animation in between screens (similar to push.js in Ratchet http://maker.github.io/ratchet/#push ). This in turn is inspired by jquery-pjax ( https://github.com/defunkt/jquery-pjax )

Explained in short - there should be some way to fetch the HTML for a "new page" replacing the older page without a page refresh. This way we can have nice CSS transitions between the pages. If we can plug the effects from something like Effeckt (http://h5bp.github.io/Effeckt.css/dist/) in there this could lead to nice demo/prototype material and will also give the native coders a good idea about the animation.

My speciality is UI design and CSS. My JS is not solid enough for framework quality javascript.

The demo UI works with Angular.js.
The reason for that is because HR departments doesn't know the difference between RoR and HTML and therefore doesn't think someone lacking the latter is capable of performing the job. Ignorance in other words. Are you claiming it is the same kind of ignorance that causes companies to not hire weed smokers?
I think you could achieve this best by dropping the NC clause and enforcing the approval process by licensing the OpenDesk brandname? I think that is how Arduino works, for example. As it stands this is really not open source because you are trying to regulate how the actual information gets used, which in my opinion stifles innovation.
You're right; I am officially derisive of this discussion. You know I'm not making an argument by trying to characterize this person's actions as malicious, but you keep raising that idea as an issue, because you actively don't want to understand what's happening in this situation, but would prefer instead to demonize Facebook's security team.
There is no directive
If it's ok, here is mine as well https://github.com/MikeRogers0/LivePage

It monitors the HTML/CSS then reloads the page when something has changed. I made it when I was a full time front end developer, it still needs a lot of love but it does the job.
Obama gives clowns a bad name. The same cannot be said of Leno.
Don't worry about your English, just continue to do what you are doing. But understand one thing, what you are doing is only worth to learn one or two. If FB is paying you are not is not really matters!

I was little irritated your English was criticized heavily! And it's more irritating when a security team misses to understand a security issue when I was able to understand
Unlike nuclear weapons, I see no reason to think terrorism can ever kill any significant portion of the country's population. Ideas of terror attacks involving nuclear weapons or pandemics seem to be complete fantasy as best I can tell.
I think there are valid legally justifiable reasons for refusing the bounty, however they are outweighed by the reason for the bounty system to exist in the first place.

Not paying someone over minor violations that they only did to get your attention to the fact that something was definitely important to you is not good practice when running a bounty for bugs.
Great. Have you ever seen a toilet on a bus that people ride for ~35 minutes? I haven't.