skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most European rail networks are not profitable. Night trains have approximately never been profitable for anyone, anywhere. They survived only due to government subsidy, and those same governments are not subsidizing the high-speed trains. The price difference has nothing to do with high-speed vs low-speed and everything to do with government subsidy.

Cheaper and easier transport will always increase demand; either you're for cheap transport or against it, and if you're for it you accept that it will be used by commuters living further away from the cities they work in. Making the rail networks cheaper, as the author seems to advocate, would only increase this effect. Or is the argument that leisure travellers care more about cost and commuters care more about journey time? Maybe, but the rail network would be completely unsustainable without commuter traffic.

And as someone who travelled by EuroCity, they weren't the land of milk and honey this author portrays; they were (and still are, in Eastern Europe) frequently several hours late, leading to missed connections. I do think there are cases for some international trains to be scheduled more sensibly (Italy's high-speed trains that then sit for 30 minutes in each station on the way up are ludicrous; Eurostar has sped up by several minutes over the last few years by eliminating less popular stops), but at some point you simply can't match the speed advantage of true high-speed rail.

The specific route complained about here is a dogleg for connectivity reasons; what you're not seeing on his map is the line from Calais (and thence from Britain) coming down to meet it at Lille. There are winners and losers in any routing decision (basically the high speed lines her are a tree centered on Lille, so rather than two distinct lines from Paris to Brussels and Calais there's one line that branches. Longer than a direct train, but it avoids building two distinct lines), but as a Brit I'm profoundly grateful for this one, which makes day trips to Paris or Brussels plausible in a way they simply weren't before.
Nope, it's quite a short route. You delist Elsevier publications fromt he impact index you calculate for measuring their productivity, and they'll intantly care.

Universities are pissed off Elsevier when buying their material, but completely in love when hiring researchers, and also wondering why researchers don't seem to get what they feel about the matter.
I'm not just complaining about poor usability, I'm complaining about how everything is "gorgeous" and "blended" and "just so". There seems to be no edge, no clarity - it's all "just so" and "swoosh."

Problem is, I don't have the language to make it clear what I mean, and if you don't see it, I can't help you to do so. So many web designers think it looks lovely, so that's what we get. I think it all looks "meh", but you know, what do I know, I'm not a designer.
I find centering in CSS pretty easy currently, what about it is troubling you? This resource (http://timseverien.nl/2013/10/css-alignment-and-sizing/) showcases a number of techniques.
If you haven't seen The Onion's[1] Onion Talks and want a good satirical criticism of TED, I highly recommend them:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkGMY63FF3Q

(There are more if you want to find them, I didn't want to pollute commentspace with too many links)

[1] The Onion is a satire newspaper, one of the first newspapers to heavily adopt an online format. They just killed their print edition for good last year.
Open source project and is a collaborative network (I'm working on it now)
His comparison on the "Paris - Brussels - Amsterdam" route is using today's prices:

"The relatively modest time gain of the Thalys has a steep price. The fare for the Étoile du Nord was a fixed amount calculated according to a rate per kilometre. Converted to the current kilometre charges of the Belgian, French and Dutch railways, a single ticket Paris-Amsterdam over the same route (the blue line) would now cost 66 euro, regardless of whether you buy it two months in advance or right before you leave.

[...]

You can still travel cheaply by low speed train between Paris and Amsterdam -- over the same route that was covered by the Étoile du Nord. But you have to be very patient: the trip takes 7 to 8 hours and you have to switch trains 5 to 6 times (Paris-Maubeuge-Jeumont-Erquelinnes-Charleroi-Brussels-Amsterdam). A one-way trip costs €66, half the price of the most common fare of the Thalys.

The "Barcelona - Paris" route was completed recently (December 15, 2013), so presumably both fare figures are current.
those same governments are not subsidizing the high-speed trains

In the UK at the moment, the government is about to blow £50 billion on a high speed rail link. If that's not subsidizing, what is?
How Mosquitoes Detect People
Time travelling debuggers are awesome, but they still can't compete with already knowing the cause of the bug when trying to find the shortest path from bug to cause!
I'm wondering if this type of analysis has been done for HS2 (http://hs2.org.uk/about-hs2/facts-figures/route-trains-cost). I can see a situation where routes are closed to force uptake of the HS2 route thus making HS2 a 'success'.

I would highlight that the cost of air flights is kept artificially low by the lack of fuel duty or VAT on fuel. So flights do come across as cheaper. Of note, in the UK public buses are able to claim a fuel duty rebate. I am unsure on the situation with diesel trains.
You don't have to live/work in Utah.

Its a peculiar graphical distribution such that anywhere within 300 miles of Chicago (including rural wisconsin, etc) or on the coasts, no one cares about stuff like that. But god help you in between the areas of freedom. Appalachia, Dakotas, the remaining English speaking parts of the south, that U shaped area of wanna be theocratic dictatorship is right out of one of Charlie Stross's novels, not even a parody, really.
Not everyone loved TED. I've seen people pointing out that they're essentially selling the wealthy a way to feel good about themselves and spinning it as something world-changing for years.
Why You Are Stuck In Your Career
Yeah, riding train in Germany is just too expensive. Unfortunately I still have to use it because currently it is more flexible than the bus lines. I really hope that the competition will drive the train prices down, but that's something I don't believe in...

Visiting my girlfriend at the other and of Germany costs 220 Euro if I pay the full price. Sometimes you get cheaper tickets but that's still too much. Just visiting each other twice a month cost about 400 Euro which woudl be better invested in a vacation or something similar.
Luckily, DB are raising their prices, in some cases by over 8%, to remain competitive.
Keep up the good work! Google is a giant standing on the shoulders of giants. The nay sayers with their devil's advocate arguments are just keeping you on your toes!

Google did not invent the search engine, they reinvented it. We can thank Google rather than anyone else (including Tim Berners Lee) for placing the wealth of the world's information at our fingertips. Walk into any office and you will see Google Maps on screen somewhere. Again, Google did not invent maps but it is Google Maps that everyone uses.

Thanks to the efforts of Google we no longer need to know 'general knowledge', i.e. the stuff that wins prizes in quiz shows. We can use our brains for storing more useful stuff. This is tantamount to evolution. As mentioned, keep up the good work!
I went to a one day conference in London and, to save costs, decided to take the coach overnight (depart Leeds at 1am and then leaving London at 9pm in the evening - sleeping on the coach both ways).

The train worked out at £40ish each way (I didn't know I was going till a couple of weeks in advance, if it had been months I'm sure I could have bought tickets for less).

Using Megabus, I paid £4 to get there, £8 to get back ... and then had to pay £9 to get a taxi from the city centre to my house.
Terrible, terrible article about a ridiculously unrobust experiment. Clickbait even by the standards of Daily Dot.
Is this real? If someone isn't rolling on the floor of their creepy, poorly illuminated lab, laughing; this is huge!
It states no such thing. In fact, the website clearly states exactly the opposite, in "normal" (i.e., not legalese) language:

"For subscription articles: These rights are determined by a copyright transfer, where authors retain scholarly rights to post and use their articles."

http://www.elsevier.com/journal-authors/author-rights-and-re...
usually these projects are pandering to donors and expected donors. There have been numerous reports that many high speed rail lines only serve to allow the very well off to live where they want with access to other places they need.

The build out costs are not the same as funding day to day operations. Usually subsidizing implies the fare is lowered because of government spending.
Probably they cover UK only.
Here's what TED have to say about themselves on their website: "We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and, ultimately, the world. So we're building a clearinghouse of free knowledge from the world's most inspired thinkers, and also a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other."
Sure, but the best-guess calculation is that it's going to be worth that £50 billion in terms of economic return for the country (even if not all of that is realized as revenue for the government/train operator). But night trains can't be justified even with that kind of logic, only on some kind of social "it's good for people to be able to travel even if it's not economically reasonable" grounds.
Ghost estate
Well according to the source article Amazon blamed the removal on "a temporary issue with some of our catalog data" which it says has been fixed, adding that "customers should never lose access to their Amazon Instant Video purchases." It says the database error was unrelated to Disney's request.

Think we should wait a bit before we jump to conclusions here. May all have been a software bug.
Disney should be forced to reimburse customers. If they permitted a retailer to sell and item, collected their part of the sale, then invalidating the sale at a later date should be illegal or done with a penalty.

As it stands now, no item you buy from any source is safe.
Why we need to work 6 hours a day
DRM clawback. It's all fun and games until your new car won't start some morning because someone typed in the wrong account number and deactivated your software.

We need consumer protection laws but that would require politicians to care about people and not corporations, so never going to happen.
The price model of the rail company doesn't make much sense here (germany). I can travel from Berlin to Paris cheaper, than I can from Frankfurt to Munich for example. But then they have special offers for certain regions sometimes, which you can combine with regular tickets for the rest of your route, which makes it cheaper again. Or in combination with a flight ticket. Or traveling in groups with special ticket, or traveling in a certain region with a specific train and so on. It is so complicated and confusing that even the staff at the train station can't always tell you whats the best ticket.
"doing some shady shit"
Or he is a freedom fighter)
We need more research on sleep, to be able to further improve the 33% of our life (assuming 8 hours of sleep).

While ideas like polyphasic sleep are cool to tinker with, the long term risks are too high IMO to 'experiment' as we know so little about sleep.
Edna is, without a doubt, my favourite character in this movie. And one of my favourites of all time. The short film "jack-jack attack" is also very good. I think I enjoy that almost as much as the full movie.
Now we have brand new CSS and we do a subset of the cool things, we could do in SVG since ten years. I'm a bit confused.

Oh and it doesn't work in Opera 12 .
You're not allowed to post your accepted manuscripts on "systematic distribution services" (except arxiv). Defined as:

"Subject repositories that aim to aggregate and openly distribute AAMs authored by researchers in specific subject areas."

(There's a difference between AAM and pre-print.)
BT forces porn filter choice
Edible Plant Database To Help World Feed Itself
Brute Force Parallelization
I often forget how late IE was to this party
Couldn't resist. http://vimeo.com/17346855
20 Most Active Angel Investors
In about 6 weeks, my girlfriend and I will be flying into Frankfurt - because that was an available cheap flight via China from Hong Kong, where we live.

We will be travelling from Frankfurt to Strasbourg (fast train, 1 change), from Strasbourg to Brussels (fast train, change in Paris), from Brussels to Amsterdam (fast train, direct), and from Amsterdam back to Frankfurt (fast train, direct). Total price for these train journeys, for two people, is €330 - because I booked the apparently hard-to-get cheap fares.

Compared with travelling by plane on low-cost carriers:
We will mostly be going from city centre to city centre.
We will have power at our seats in at least some cases.
We will be free to get up and walk around for comfort.
We will be able to bring our own food and drink onboard.
We will get to see some of Europe passing by the window.
And we will have to be on the platform a couple of minutes before departure time, not an hour or more...

Trains make more sense, in terms of service and cost, over short-to-medium distances. Barcelona to Amsterdam is probably over the line where flying makes more sense. Our Strasbourg to Brussels journey will take around 5 hours, but over 1 hour of that is time to change trains - and stations - in Paris, so I think that still falls before said line.
The original article is more clear. They removed the show retroactively by mistake.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/dec/16/amazon-dis...
I agree with gizzlon. The inline-block versions are the closest things to actually saying "put this block in the middle". For a system that claims to be all about layout, it shouldn't be so obtuse to say "stick this, whatever this is, in the middle."

Also, auto-flowing text split between columns as a "column" property of some kind would be nice.

The list you provided is handy, but it shouldn't require knowing that you have to look up specific cases.
Direct save web articles from any mobile app to Evernote (pineco.me)
Does anyone have a tutorial that shows how to implement a loading screen?
How the French Government’s “French Tech” label affects French startups
I agree. Pulling the purchased content makes no sense for Disney. If the general public is routinely exposed to the fact that digital purchases aren't "real", publishers will not be able to charge as much for them, since the value customers perceive will be lower (and that caps what the publishers can charge). Disney might pull future purchases from Amazon (which is apparently what they meant to do), but they'd be idiots to pull existing purchases from Amazon. Which doesn't completely disprove they wouldn't do it, but the self-interested thing to do is still to leave them on there for customers who already bought them.
I'm not sure that matters to Pierre Omidyar. Bruce could help make sure the rest of the new media organization's systems are secure and also help train more traditional journalists on how to stay secure.
What makes Good Code good
Alternative Mirror;
http://fedora.mirror.nexicom.net/linux/releases/20/
Good lord, a link to slashdot, which links to theguardian, which links to boingboing... Doesn't anyone believe in primary sources anymore? I miss the good old days when a 20 line "story" would be spread across 20 pages not 20 sites.

I looked at the movie on Amazon and its still up for sale, although the "Most Helpful customer reviews" is less than glowing with christmas cheer. Its glowing like a heavily used nuclear test site.

This is weird and disturbing... so I can buy and pay for something today that was removed from sale yesterday, or just what is going on here?

This has never happened to me with books / stuff in general at Amazon but the half life of subscribe and save groceries must be about 6 months because seemingly every month something else gets discontinued. I can't complain too much, often its about half the price of the local grocery stores, but its still annoying. More like "subscribe for a couple months and save" at best.
I suggest that you apply to companies directly, with a cover letter tailored for each company/job, and avoid these generic CV-mangling systems.
Think bigger than Linux. Think those with freebsd boxes, netbsd boxes, solaris boxes, etc. They're all very much relevant, but left out in the cold by deliberate decisions of the systemd folks to eschew compatibility. Functionality-wise, journald has no way of acting on the messages it receives. With syslogd, it's fairly trivial to write a script that will send a nagios alert every time a service is restarted, for example. How does one do that with journald?
Regardless of whether we fix the memory leak or buy more RAM we are still running our production service on a single server, and could do with a high-availability setup.
Yes, I think this is closer to the real problem here: Politicians just loves these big, glamorous infrastructure projects, and anything "train" also tastes green, so that's double the glamour for the same money, and any unintended consequences are, well, unintended, so who can possibly blame them for it?

HS2 has already been heavily criticized for overly optimistically assuming away all problems with the line, and it would not surprise me one bit if one of the assumptions in the cost/benefit analysis is that all existing passengers will use the new line at double (or whatever) the cost, and that the older slower line can close.
It's a shock because the university system is paid for by us, by our tuition and taxes. People pay high tuition to go to research universities and the societal bargain USED to be that those tuitions subsidized basic research which is available to society. Elsevier isn't contributing shit compared to us, yet they can apparently lock up publication with a really small amount of money compared to the rest of the uni system.
Or Stallman:

"For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I also have not net connection much of the time.) To look at page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time."
Amnesty International USA considers using big data to predict rights violations
Accidental Tax Break Saves Wealthiest Americans $100 Billion
Perhaps one reason for the change is also that finding cool and new stuff was "easier" 50 years ago. In my opinion all the low hanging fruits are already taken and in order to invent a new transistor you need more than just a few guys sitting in a room with little equitment.
At least part of the issue is that Boltbus is traveling on heavily subsidized highways. On the Northeast Regional, ticket fares more than cover costs. In comparison, only about 50% of highway construction and maintenance is paid for by highway and gas taxes and trucking fees, with the rest coming from general taxes. New York in particular is a state which funds highway maintenance heavily out of general tax revenue.

Still, I think air travel is the clear loser in the comparison. The public transit route to LGA or JFK is a bus trip through not very pleasant parts of Harlem and Queens, and is just a huge PITA with luggage. Strolling into Penn Station is a breeze.
Prices won't go down, probably, but bus lines will diversify. They work really well and many people use them.

Random comparison: Stuttgart–Berlin is 6 hours, 140€ by train and 8 hours, 25€ by bus, going two or three times a day.
I'd love an app frontend for http://pizzacodes.com. This would basically consist of two unique pages / views:

1. A location search 'view'.

2. A Location view that would show a list of coupons for that given store.

Both of these views would use an api that I create to return the nearby stores / content.
Deck the halls…Decorating this Christmas Safely
My wife and I ride Amtrak all the time between Wilmington and DC, because with a 1 year old the extra room is a godsend. We've had uniformly positive experiences with the customer service, both the Red Caps who always give us a hand with the stroller and finding a seat at the end of a car, to the ticketing protocol that automatically refunds no-shows (although unfortunately that's changing in March).
Care to share some links? I just declined meeting my brother today, because the trip (70km) costs vastly more money than I'd spend on a train ticket and still a lot more than the route costs by car. We're talking about slow trains (Regionalverkehr) here..

That said, I haven't actually encountered those coaches before..
Nice write-up. Brings back good memories. (Pak, LHarc and above all ARJ). BiModem FTW! I feel ancient.
Heh, thanks. I only looked at misparsing and didn't think about the consequences :D
The fact this can happen is the problem. Technology enabling such widespread censorship must not be so eagerly adopted.
Thanks! And I totally agree. While I like to think project tasks that say "make the logo bigger" aren't as sensitive as, like, bank statement data, I definitely understand the concern.

So far, I've had 0 pushback to these little notes I send, and the good (helping them close more deals = more money = less chance of going out of business) has outweighed the thus far non-existant bad, but it's still something to think about even if it hasn't become a problem (yet?)

If you ever sign up in the future, drop me a note and I can run you through how Planscope can work for your business over Skype or something :-)
amazon says real-time, but i'm 99% sure they mean (comparatively) low latency.
Looks like someone's launched a TED Offensive.
The only real reason people use Tor at all is for shady shit. They'll deny it all they want and bullshit on about "freedom", but not even Stallman is this autistic. Come on.
> The public takedowns related to tor have been more about firefox than windows. But I get that Linux fans like to think that this is their sole bailiwick.

It's not exactly fanboyism that makes security-conscious people prefer Linux. In fact, anybody with even a basic understanding of infosec knows that Windows should be considered wide open: Microsoft has backdoors, they give the NSA backdoors, and their code isn't open to peer review. Moreover, the Tor Freedom Host attack only exploited Firefox on Windows.

> Just using tails or whonix and being super paranoid...because security...is kind of a shit lifestyle decision.

Don't you think this is a little rude? Or even just presumptive?
I never understood why HSTs are supposed to be in competition with planes.

For short trips (<500km), HSTs generally win against planes when comparing door-to-door times, but so do cars. For longer trips, planes win. Period.

To me, the HST is what makes the train able to compete with the car for medium-distance travel. Let's take an example from Germany: Hamburg to Frankfurt. It's about 500km, which takes 4-5 hours by car. The HST link takes 3:30h - if you take the time from station to station. But that's not a fair comparison, because generally you do not want to go from station to station but from some place in Hamburg to some place in Frankfurt. If we add an hour of traveling by local public transportation, we arrive at a local trip time of 4:30, in the same range as the car. The HST has made traveling by train a viable option - not insanely fast, but comparable to the car.

Mass transit is slow compared to cars. HST is fast. Combine those, and HSTs make public transport a viable alternative to going by car, time-wise.