skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can blame government for the dysfunction, but I wouldn't be quick to completely blame local government for the stalls in public transit development.

The majority of NYC subway development occurred prior to the introduction of environmental policies such as NEPA (1970). In fact since 1956, NYC has only constructed 2 additional subway lines (1988, 1989) and currently has one more under construction.

Meanwhile SF BART didn't start operations until 1972. In fact I believe if BART didn't start planning and construction prior to national environmental policy implementation, BART may have never been built.

If we look overseas, since 1970, Tokyo opened 6 subway lines (4 Tokyo Metro, 2 Toei subway--Tokyo has two subway companies). While that doesn't seem like much of a difference, consider that those subway lines directly compete with surface rail transit systems operated by 8 different companies which are "feeder" lines and additional JR which not only is a feeder system, but also operates the main loop line for Tokyo.

It should also be noted that NEPA was actually a direct response to the Interstate Highway project where a common complaint was residents losing their communities or properties due to highway being paved right through the city. But NEPA requires environmental reviews for any new development so mass transit systems were affected as well.

So I would say the dysfunctional is not just at the city or state level, but also at the federal level as well.
I would like to see that study saying most projects come in under budget. I'm guessing it doesn't apply to the large and complex projects we're talking about here, which are probably harder to estimate. And, the fact that it's in California may matter, too. According to Musk yesterday, without a citation:

I don’t think we should do the high-speed
rail thing because it’s currently slated
to be roughly $70 billion but if one ratio
is the cost at approval time versus the
cost at completion time of most large
projects I think it’s probably going to be
close to $100 billion.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/hannahelliott/2013/08/12/latest-...

And, according to this:

http://californiawatch.org/dailyreport/bullet-train-bidder-h...

...the lowest (and winning) bidder for early work on the California HSR has a history of cost overruns, so things aren't starting out so hot.

Your last paragraph seems to say that we don't want accurate estimates because then we might not do the projects. That's the point of knowing the costs. We don't want to do projects that are too expensive.

Large projects, like Hyperloop or HSR, are probably the ones particularly likely to be "outliers" (if indeed projects with overruns are outliers) and big projects are the ones where that damage costs the most, so it's a double whammy.

Meanwhile, if we're now accepting that lowballing is a good idea, as your last paragraph says, then I don't understand why you seem to be defending the original article as Musk must just be lowballing and he expects overruns. It will take a lot of overruns to catch up with the ostensible California HSR budget.

I will say that, with SpaceX, Musk and the government have fixed-price contracts, so SpaceX eats cost overruns. They also have the lowest space cargo delivery cost for their class. This gives me some evidence that Musk could deliver more cheaply and on budget than the linked industry observer expects.
As pointed out in the comments, this is just a mock-up. http://i.imgur.com/U17Js1V.jpg
The GLCM launchers got treatied away with the Soviets. The transporter/erector/launcher was a 8x8 MAN truck that had good off-road capabilities. Compared to a sub, they're dirt cheap.
A good comparison:

Current estimated power consumption of the Bitcoin network: 1.67 Mega watts. (6,028.57 megawatt hours http://blockchain.info/stats).

Typical power generated by a single Boeing 747: 140 Mega Watts. There's hundreds of these flying right now, yet no-one is appalled about the carbon footprint. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(power)
It's strange they created it using the old look when it was presumably in development around the same time as iOS 7. I imagine the iWork team saw iOS 7 announced at the keynote and though "shit, why did nobody tell us?".
Pfew, The Guardian seems to be trying to win the Biggest Bullshit Of The Year award for 2013? Google mentions that automatically scanning Gmail and showing relevant ads has been standard from the start and is part of their privacy policy. The Guardian makes this into a vague NSA reference to link-bait... Terrible journalism, if you could even call it that.
Tim Cook Needs To Hit Ignore When Carl Icahn Calls Back
How to Totally Rock Your UX/UI Portfolio
Pets in Danger on Craigslist
Might silk road be the largest working example of agorism to date? Fascinating how they create a network where buyers can comfortably evaluate their options with the help of hundreds of reviews, and then order from the safety of their home.
It doesn't say in oz or grams how much coffee you are actually getting. From some rough math I would have to guess it is about 6oz. For $15 that seems really expensive even when compared to craft coffee (tonx/toby's estate) which is around $19 (shipping included) for 12oz bag.
Great update. I never cared to sign up for Gravatar as it's now owned by WordPress, but it was a minor annoyance that I was not identifiable by my avatar.
The difference is sending emails to some mailing list and waiting for someone to answer, vs. entering a few keywords to Google and have the top result be the answer you want because someone already asked the same question before.

This is not a stab at Go or its maturity, but rather a realistic assessment of the importance of answers being (nearly) instantly available when you're working on a project or troubleshooting a critical issue.
The Leaf is a superb vehicle in every aspect, except for range and price. Given a little time the tech will come close to Tesla's.

They could license Tesla's battery technology, but I doubt Musk would help set up competition to the future Model E.
I don't suppose you've put that repo anywhere we can have a look at? :)
I feel like the "network" benefit of LinkedIn is close to zero. That is, when was the last time anyone said "I would like to talk to person X at Company Y. Oh, one of my friends is connected to person X. I'll ask that person for a warm introduction" Is anyone seeing or doing that?
"easily destroyed by much cheaper drones"

To a certain extent, this has been true for more than two decades. I used to work as a radar engineer for the RAAF, and every time we went on exercises against US forces (both teams flying F 18s, but with different missile payloads, we had AIM9s, the Americans had AMRAAM), we would see our aircraft swatted from the sky before we could even get the bogeys on weapons-system radar. Talk about dog-fighting maneuverability and visibility is just ridiculous - if you're using those characteristics, you've already lost the battle. In the control room we used to joke that the USN could have sent P51s equipped with AMRAAMs and AWACS support and they would still win.

Modern fighter aircraft need to:

a) not be seen
b) be fast (time to target is still important!)
c) carry a decent payload of weapons.

Ideally target selection should be provided by AWACS, and missile-sensors provide the final kill guidance, allowing the fighter (AKA missile-launch platform) to remain stealthy. In the absence of AWACS, the fighter will need to carry it's own sensor suite.

Modern air warfare is all about sensors, ECM and stealth. The airframe is almost inconsequential.
Personally I don't pay for any premium services for LinkedIn but I can say that my LinkedIn profile consistently gets me quality calls from recruiters. In fact, it led me into a series of consistently better paying jobs quite quickly.

I devoted consistent effort to building my LinkedIn network over time so I have a very large number of connections now. I get the sense that the system is underprovisioned for me, because the site is slow as hell, often I can't see the messages and invitations I've been sent until I've done several reloads.

I actually would pay for a premium service that is overprovisioned for me and fast enough for me that I'd want to spend more time with it.
All good points, but there is actually the bigger social problem which is that tech companies are generating an increasing amount of wealth and concentrating it among a smaller number of employees without the overall economy growing at the same rate. During the industrial age there was the natural consequence that large companies needed many employees. Now that tacit social contract is being up-ended and nowhere is this more visible than in San Francisco.

Too many techies ignore this reality and soothe their conscience by an almost religious belief in meritocracy and that anyone can do what they do, they just need to retrain. I'm not trying to assign blame or say that we should feel guilty about our relative success, but we need to acknowledge the structural problem and think about how it can be solved before it turns into real class warfare.
Free Online Video Courses on Cryptography
Productivity Tip: Turn off Mail Distractions on Your iPhone
To everyone complaining about Origin or that these are mainstream games:

EA is giving the entirety of their income from this to charity. They likely think getting people to install Origin is a net benefit, but what more do you want?
Been a while since I saw it, but I believe they only mentioned something like that there would be "a new release of iWork this year". No specifics about how major it'll be (still "iWork '09"?) or whether that was OS X, iOS, or both.
Aside from the wishy-washy fairness argument, I can see a couple of actual critiques:

1) The busses displace the attention and money of a lot of motivated and well-off tech workers who might otherwise demand improved public transit systems.

2) The busses artificially distort the housing market in SF. Previously the number of people who wanted to live in SF was limited by the number of jobs available in the city - now that number includes anyone with access to a shuttle. And the people with jobs in SF now can't afford to live where they work.

I think the fallacy here is that without the busses, you'd have 10,000 (or whatever the number) tech workers driving 1+ hours from North Beach to Mountain View in their own cars. In reality, most of those people would just move closer to where they work.
Nonsense. I'm talking about the SAME data taking more memory to represent. Plus, all things being equal a larger memory space will take more time to GC, and GCs become longer, not shorter.

The JVM does things suboptimally in a number of ways. Object memory overhead is relatively high - typically 8 or 16 bytes per object, strings as UTF-16 (vs Go's UTF-8), etc. It really adds up, and funtional languages tend to churn lots of GC.
Interestingly it looks like they're still using Google Maps in Find My iPhone. I wish they'd also change the name of that seeing as it finds iPhone's, iPad's, and Mac's.
A day in the life of a startup CTO
The Dread Pirate's curse is that he'll never be able really spend much of this pile of currency that he's accumulated, at least not without drawing attention to himself and getting busted.

History has shown that these guys eventually get busted but rarely for drug dealing; it's usually the IRS that busts them for tax evasion. If you're buying fancy cars, big houses, yachts, or businesses, eventually someone is going to catch on and follow the money trail.
This is leaner than lean.
Ask HN: What is the best forum builder software/ app?
In iOS7, menu transparency that blur the content below it give a sense of depth in a similar way drop shadows do. UI elements are in the top layer, with content in the lower layer. Parallax in the home screen is also there to add depth, as well as a very subtle transparency in some app that allow you to see your (blurred) wallpaper while in app.

There are also some interesting use of solid color to indicate interactable elements (icons or links that are part of the UI are in the same solid color) that will be greyed out when there are layer above it (e.g. via action sheet).

Most of these are not in the iCloud website, however. And I'm still not sure I like the new visual style.
More than 100,000 want to go to Mars and not return
I'm definitely not a recruiter and LinkedIn could easily extrapolate that from my resume. Say for example I just want to do some due diligence on a contractor (or business associate or company exec. or whatever). I don't want to connect, just see their qualifications, general background, etc.

Logged in:
http://media.tumblr.com/ba1105d066fd8c3acca2909898d5b603/tum...

Logged out:
http://media.tumblr.com/17fe723913901fe9a1e0c0c53b6ba6e4/tum...
You can't be sure of that unless you attend the same cocktail parties as Sally, Ben and Amit.
I'm surprised at how many apps push distractions at us, and how tricky it is to find these settings. Mail for me is a big one - I get tons of email every day, and having my iPhone buzz or ring each time is ridiculously distracting...
Very true. I really need to sharpen my awk/sed/grep skills, but damn, some of those 400 character awk "one-liners" hurt my brain.

Perl regexes are rightfully known for being cryptic but those awk statements make me cry for my mama.
What really bothers me is the amount of 'bs' skills some of my coworkers state they have. It's an honor-based network being abused by some.

It's also funny when non-SME (Subject Matter Experts) endorse SME skills. In my case, a Realtor endorsing OOP skills. Go figure!
It's like the WSJ paywall. They know you can get around it, and at the end of the day they don't want to hide the information from someone who's willing to work hard to get it. Eventually, if it's worth enough, they'll pay for ease of access.
Hopefully someone will get busy on that. Great project!
They've had some problems with muggings, but I haven't seen more panhandling than usual near them.
Thanks for the heads up. We're working on it now.
Well, you can sell GPL'd software today for "multi kilobuck" prices too, if you wish, without affecting how Free the end product is.
That's my primary objection. While the rest of the icons look so light and minimalist, the Contacts icon feels heavier, more complex.
If i bought a domain trough bitdomain.biz and somehow i have problems with it (like getting stolen the password, somebody else claiming it), how can they verify that i am the person that bought originally the domain.
Typical HN whining about everything (I mean not you but the other negative comments)

I don't like EA too but that's a generous offer. I paid more than the avarage, got some awesome games and my money went to charities. I won, the charities won and I guess EA won too.

+ I guess no one remembers here that how bad Steam was in 2004. It was the worst thing ever and essentially it killed the CS scene. Now look at Steam and everyone loves it. I love it too. And I just want to say that I believe everyone can change, so EA and Origin too.
There is always a debate about how much to spend and what to spend it on. I believe these issues are what primarily distinguish republicans from democrats.

I agree that Military Keynesianism is not the best way for the government to stimulate the economy. That does not change the fact that it is the de facto economic policy of the United States.

Here are some relevant analyses from inside and outside the Pentagon.

- Spinney's "Defense Power Games" http://www.dnipogo.org/fcs/def_power_games_98.htm * Chomsky's -

- "The Pentagon System" http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/PentagonSystem_Cho....
> But the question for everyone else is, why are employers
> (who pay to access the database) and job seekers (who
> pay for database positioning) playing along while
> LinkedIn sells everyone out with this game of payola?

There is no "payola" in searching the database. Job seekers aren't paying for database positioning, they are paying only to be at the top of the list of "here are people who applied for your job". This is mentioned by Corcodilos in his article then immediately handwaved away as if it doesn't matter, but this point completely changes the thrust of his argument.

You don't show up at the top of search results no matter what kind of account you have; your payment or lack thereof does not manipulate organic search results. It only puts you at the top of a list of people who applied for jobs using the "Apply for jobs" function. The value for the free account-holder and for the recruiter is still intact.
> strings as UTF-16 (vs Go's UTF-8), etc.

Strings aren't traced, so that has no impact on GC time.
Depends on the country you live in, and whether you're willing to relocate to spend your money. A lot of countries will look the other way if you invest a reasonable amount of money into developing their economy or people.

There are also many, many ways of laundering your money.
Hackers Portrayal in the media
Glad someone enjoyed that. I think I had Thrift Shop on repeat while building the API pages one weekend. :)
"It could be that China doesn’t know how to build a working lift fan and that’s why they left it off, Aboulafia said. But for a country that has unveiled two different radar-evading stealth warplane prototypes in just the last two years, that seems unlikely. It’s more plausible that China could build a lift fan-equipped plane and has chosen not to."

The major difference is in posture. The US military wants to be able to project power globally. That means fighting from carriers or allied bases of varying quality half way around the world. The Chinese only care about their borders and regional power projection. VSTOL doesn't gain them anything since they'll never be that distant from their own bases.

This is the same reason why the Chinese haven't put much into carriers, but have a ton of ballistic missile ships.
The problem comes down to trust and incentives. The "promoted" job board model leads to a middle man agent ("agent" in the Economics sense) with asymmetric information who is incentivized to give poor advice. LinkedIn wants you to trust their matching algorithm, but then goes behind your back and supplants the best matches with whoever the highest bidder happens to be.

Instead of benefiting when their customers get value from their service (successful placements), LinkedIn is profiting from desperation and frustration (the more unsatisfied costs - "free" grade users, the more potential paying customers), and simultaneously making the search process more difficult for all parties involved.

LinkedIn's position in the job search marketplace is as a monopolist provider of up-to-date candidate information, a valuable side effect of their primary virtue: being the winner take all social network for the corporate world.

Rent-seeking behavior from monopoly providers with asymmetric information should surprise no one. Rent-seeking behavior leading to angry market participants should surprise no one.
Yep. Once it's 'just' fuel, it's like flying a 747 across the ocean (maybe not in steerage, but chartering one), rather than building a vehicle and throwing it away. It's a 2+ order of magnitude difference, which should change things significantly.
Mine is pretty boring...

https://identicons.github.com/eberfreitas.png

But overall, it looks really cool :)
What I think most people miss is that Air to Air missiles are effectively beyond-visual-range Mach 4+ drones at this point. Stealth works, dog fighting is pointless.
I actually had no problem with clicking accurately. Instead of pushing "forward", I twitched my finger downwards, like you would normally do when clicking a mouse. My problem is fingers would randomly appear and disappear, despite the fact my hands hadn't moved (or at least not enough for me to notice they were moving). I attempted to play cut the rope and was completely unable to get it to reliably track a single finger.
The gif loaded and played seamlessly. The video was a placeholder which loaded a full screen QuickTime window that delayed for 5-10 seconds then played.

Claim "gifs are still the simplest way to show short video clips on the web." agreed.
I'd be humored to hear your idea of what the difference is, given the misplaced use of scare-quotes.

A hyperthread core is a virtual core -- it is not actually a core at all but is a re-purposed, possibly stalled physical core. While it can improve some scenarios, in some cases (particularly core-saturating benchmarks) it can actually hurt performance.

This is hardly an out there or controversial statement. Further I didn't say to disable hyperthreading, I said to try setting parallelism to the physical cores. Again, nothing, whatsoever, controversial about that.
Still seems to be based on SproutCore. You can see the list of acknowledgements at the top of one of iWork's source files (https://beta.icloud.com/applications/iw/1ABeta108/editor/1AB...) to get a rough idea of what they're using.
I'm not trying to sell 'how-to' while learning 'how-to'.

There's a reason why my blog articles are boring "how to calculate your metrics right" posts instead of more sexy "try these things for better conversions" type of posts. I'm not a CRO or business optimization expert and I'm not trying to pass as one.

That would be fake and it would hurt my business.

Like I said in my post, my problem is that people don't realize that SaaS Compass doesn’t rely on my knowledge on how to run a SaaS. They, like you (even after reading my post!), expect that it would and look for that authority.

It's a question of perception and selling, not of a real lack of experience/expertise.

As Amy said, it's about copywriting. But I also have this gut feeling that no matter how I present SaaS Compass some people are still going to look for more "authority" or whatever it is.
Does this mean we have the source code to the TrustZone SecureOS?
Would Wikipedia or Craigslist qualify?
She may have been better off if she asked questions rather than jumping to conclusions. In other words, if she had read pmarca's excellent advice, she may have made the sale and earned a repeat customer.
I agree. I think Military Keynesianism is a bad economic policy.

I have seen lots of articles that discuss wasteful DoD spending. But I see very few that discuss __why__ the DoD spends money this way. And why it continues. This type of spending is not a new phenomenon.

To me these "why" questions are the most important and intellectually interesting aspects of these issues. But they are often ignored.
Intelligence committee urged to explain if they withheld crucial NSA document
i spent some time working on something like this - i wanted something that could carry as much information as a typical cryptographic hash, but be memorable to a human.

it turns out that it's quite hard to make that much information memorable :o) (it's even harder to measure whether something is memorable, or even "different" - i ended up getting sidetracked into extreme value statistics, and then giving up)

but one important trick was to make the pattern symmetric in some way, which seems to be also used here. although it halves the amount of data (assuming other parameters constant) it makes it much, much easier to remember.

anyway, these look good (for this use case).
Sparklines for your shell
Mine: https://identicons.github.com/masonhensley.png
Asm.js is an extraordinarily optimizable, low-level subset of JavaScript
Is that $25k in revenue? Profit? Or total transactions from which you take a %?

Just curious. I really like your lean approach.
So, "this car is great except for getting places or being able to afford it?" You can't ignore arguably two of the most important aspects of a commercially available vehicle and say it's great besides those.

This computer is great, except for the storage space and processor speed.
yeah, for musk's platform, realistically for the first [N] launches he's only going to be using the first launch for humans and subsequent reuses for non-human launches, where [N] is some number sufficient to get good statistics on reliability.