skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is already a fix for this from Opera.

details at http://my.opera.com/danaleks/blog/2009/09/11/opera-10-slow-i...
When you take a look at the map you only can think: This can't be all of it. Some areas have no high speed rail at all and the areas that have are often isolated from each other.

In Germany we have high speed rail all over the place, in France it's similar. It has been there for years. Japan is best at building high speed railway systems.
Speaking of iterating often, how's your project coming?
Chicago-based non-profit news org shuts down, to return as for-profit
The Second Résumé
Second Resume management will spawn a big new industry.
Brizzly is a cool bear, but still a young cub.
you can't really hi-jack a train

So true. You can try, though. Let me know how it goes :-)

For sure in Europe, there is no security screening for high-speed trains like there is for planes. You'd have to be paranoid to setup the same structure (or a big hater of trains).
I think you're right. I'm not sure if it's significant (because potentially there are fewer passes), but you end up having to swap more for a single pass. You also can get a stable in-place sort by treating the equal elements specially, which is why I'd do it.
> You don't know what it's like to see megabyte after megabyte of source code scroll by, and you can't tell who wrote it.

I disagree with this statement. I think having uniformly good code is, indeed, a good thing. On the other hand, I don't believe that means you should take it so far that you can't tell who wrote the code. Good developers can, in fact, differ about how to write good code.

In fact my major general purpose complaint about Google is that they'd take a good idea and then take it way too far.
"Won't this create more urban sprawl?"

Trains contribute to sprawl, but differently than cars. American-style sprawl is the result of individuals using cars for all transportation. Communities that don't rely on cars and use trains for distance travel/commuting clump around stations as more people walk and bike when going short distances. Less wasted space.
It doesn't actually say Github is moving. It just says that Github isn't going to be supported by EngineYard in the same way. It's entirely feasible that Github remain at EngineYard.

Edit Woops. Looks like I missed the key part of a sentence there. Sorry folks.
Thanks ;) You put it far better than me.
Crockford actually makes the explicit distinction that he discovered JSON vs inventing it in a presentation he gave called "The JSON Saga".

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/video.php?v=crockford...

It seems like other people often say that he invented it, even though he doesn't say that.
Chicago news nerds are talking about this over on the Citizen: http://www.windycitizen.com/chicago/news/2009/09/11/chi-town...

The ChiTown Daily News received over $700,000 in grant funds over the last three years and has employed up to 5 full-time employees at a time. It was founded by an ex-Chicago Tribune investigative reporter as a citizen journalism operation in 2006. They've received a ton of press from the likes of the New Yorker, PBS and others. You can see the most recent clips here: http://www.chitowndailynews.org/about/press

My friends on staff are telling me they just ran out of money.

Posters over on my site are wondering how the same team's supposed to make a for-profit version of this simply by raising more money, this time from people who expect results. I'm wondering the same.
Accordingly, we are currently working directly with their next provider to maintain smooth service as they cut over.
This is about linking major metropolitan areas together, not accommodating those who wish to suburbs. One of the central tenants of this plan is that these stations should be in the heart of the cities (as is done in Europe) rather than a major commute away.

Also, I just returned from backpacking in Europe, where we used rail as our primary mode of transport. Security is minimal; among my three trips on rail in Spain, we never had our passports checked and our bags were only scanned once in Barcelona.
A small simplification/optimization:

int third = len / div;
third=third>0?third:1;

// "medians"
int m1 = left + third;
int m2 = right - third;

Instead of the worse:

int third = len / div;

// "medians"
int m1 = left + third;
int m2 = right - third;

if (m1 <= left) {
m1 = left + 1;
}
if (m2 >= right) {
m2 = right - 1;
}
Paris to Brussels is 165 miles. 1.5 hours @ 110 mph
Chicago to St. Louis is 298 miles. 1.5 hours @ 198 mph
Chicago to Houston is 938 miles. 1.5 hours @ 625 mph

The upper limit for maglev trains in 2009 is ~312 mph. The reason high-speed is not in place in the USA has more to do with the problem we were trying to solve using air travel than it had to do with whether high-speed rail would work.

Here in Chicago, we have one of the nation's finest commuter rail systems (METRA). It works great, runs on time, defeats bad weather, etc. -- for distances <= 50 miles. Beyond that, the cost-benefit analysis get hazy.
"Accordingly, we are currently working directly with their next provider to maintain smooth service as they cut over."

"Provider" really sounds like they are talking about infrastructure
It can at least explain it. Just like you'd have to adjust your reference frame a bit if you were presented with someone from a culture other than your own.
Sorry again, but I can't parse your comments at all. If we abolish copyright, do you think record labels will continue to exist in their present form?
Imaging Sheds Light on How Acupuncture Works
Besides the difficulty involved in driving a train into a building, I'm guessing it's a lot easier to destroy a train from the outside. There's no point screening passengers when anybody who wants to can throw rocks at trains, put logs across the tracks, whatever.

Edit: plane, train, whatever...
No, it will reduce urban sprawl. A quality rail network will bring the population in to the city center where it is easier to get to the train station and airport.
To the people that still do not understand what Google is doing with books.
What's the New York Times doing with Hadoop?
His "Propaganda" book is quite good too. Also he came up with the slogan, "Make the world safe for democracy"
If you're trying to put together a business plan, investors will want to hear your "total addressable/available market", which means what's the most $ your company, specifically, could make.

TAM is size of your company's market * price of 1 unit of your product.
Raffi you have a great story and one I hope to emulate one day. Best of luck with everything and congrats on your recent acquisition.
I think they could have worded this better:
"GitHub offers the largest free storage quota among the big SCM hosters, and we came to the conclusion that we didn’t want to subsidize that quota for non-Ruby developers."

It sounds odd Engine Yard hosts an entire for-profit company for free just in exchange for some complimentary accounts.

My imagination tells me GitHub is tired of being slow and Engine Yard couldn't do anything more to help them. Instead of the news being "GitHub Leaves Engine Yard Because It's Too Slow" the news is "Engine Yard Kicks GitHub To The Curb Because GitHub has Non-Ruby Repos."

I don't see either headline being positive towards Engine Yard.
Don't wait. Get an idea, get a co-founder and hit the ground running. Three years sounds like plenty of time, but it took me eight years and four failed attempts at the same goal to get where I wanted to go.

You can't count on having a perfect run. Experiment now while you still have more time on your hands.
"American's own more cars than any other group and are ridiculously mobile."

I don't have any hard, general statistics, but back in high school we did a rather informal survey, with a relatively small sample size (~50 students). Out of them roughly 80% had never left the state (Florida), of those that had, only 8% had left the country. There were also 20% of the students had never been outside of the county we were in (the ~20 miles from home I mentioned).

It certainly seems to me an inverse relationship between car ownership and mobility (on a large scale). While a car allows you massive mobility in a relatively short range, you have to be actively driving and paying attention the entire time, making it much harder to travel long distances. With mass transportation (train, place, bus, etc) you can get on and fall asleep for all that it matters to your mobility.

The lack of mass/public transportation seems to be the biggest hindrance to US mobility. Your choices are largely: Fly or Drive. If you Fly, you have to put up with the usual litany of plane complaints, and then you have to rent a vehicle when you arrive at your destination, due to the lack of reasonably accessible public transportation in most areas. If you choose to drive, getting anywhere will usually take several days, and puts a massive amount of wear on your car and the driver. I'm not sure if you've ever gone on a sizable road trip, but two years ago I did 5k miles of driving for a family vacation. I have to tell you, it was rough. Long distance driving is vastly different from driving around the city, and much more difficult on the driver.
That's exactly what the article says:

"However, in the end, the best arrangement for them was moving."
Erlang threads (processes actually), are very different from OS threads. They are extremely lightweight and allow you to do this kind of event driven networking with threaded code.
That would also be something to test for. You can always imagine a smart person missing one mistake, but once you've caught two, you start asking yourself what else they did wrong.
The best bit is at the end, where it is pointed out that Cipolla's descendants are trying to prove the point of the essay thinking if they restrict the publication of the essay on the web they will somehow profit.
"you can't really hi-jack a train and do much damage"

For an enlightening discussion on the subject:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDQNpr2RnFI#t=2m48s
Cheat Sheets for Web Design and Development
In this post I'm sharing some very excellent cheat sheets to help web designers and developers. These cheat sheets includes Photoshop, CSS, HTML, JQuery, PHP, MooTools, MySQL, Ruby on rails, Flash AS and much more.
Bah; everyone knows Rails can't scale.
and that's exactly why most internet providers specify they only support Windows (some include OSX, but not many AFAIK): if you call them with your all-custom OS and complain about faulty Internet access, they can simply say it's not their problem...
Pick a webapp. Lets take twitter or facebook, or even youtube. I'm sure there's some really interesting problems when you drill down, and it'd take a fair while to conquer the problems, but it's just a large mountain - just takes longer to climb. I'm sure most of us could build a facebook/twitter/youtube clone if we decided to.

The hard bit of course would be getting people to use it.

The world is absolutely littered with fantastic clever well written programs, that no one uses. This is why I think programming is far easier than convincing someone to use it and all that other non-programming stuff, and why I personally am far more interested in the non-technical side of the equation. In comparison, the technical side is trivial.
Skype Shuts Down Extras and Its Developer Program
> It sounds odd Engine Yard hosts an entire for-profit company for free just in exchange for some complimentary accounts.

Well, sort of. It's really a value trade-off. EY offers its customers something that would cost them $50 a month, so it's costing Github (customers) * $50 to offer that. They exchange the lost value for added value in hosting (i.e., they're "losing" a few thousand a month in free accounts for our customers, so we'll offer them free hosting to continue to offer that).

It's simple barter.
Sure, if it's not a huge digression. Gravity's Rainbow and In Remembrance Of Things Past, which I haven't read yet and are long enough to justify print reading. House of Leaves, a favorite book of mind which has a very unusual typographic layout. A Best of The Onion encyclopedia, for reading when I have to kill a little time. The last book is called Syrup, by Maxx Barry, and is maybe the best light reading I've ever come across. It's not at all deep, but it's three hundred fast-paced pages and I've read it more than anything else I can think of, because I've never been in a mood where I've picked up the book and it hasn't been appealing.

Then on the Kindle I have all the Asimov, medium-length novels, nonfiction, kid's books, essays, etc. It's a dream set-up and it all fits in a backpack.
For cargo, yes. But humans? NASA has spent decades trying to make space travel safe, and the shuttle is still one of the most dangerous ways to travel on a per-journey basis. NASA doesn't have to worry about turning a profit either.

It will be interesting to see what happens to space tourism after the first fatal crash...
Don't offer a free storage quota or limit how many projects you can host. There, problem solved. The people who leave will no longer be a drain on your servers and the people who stay will be paying for the maintenance of those servers.
Silicon Valley status threatened in green energy
That, and with the goals of the system: it could be more beneficial to get people from Detroit, Toledo, and St. Louis to Chicago, to create a vibrant midwest business "zone" across much of the rust belt by linking it to a prosperous metro, than to link Chicago to NYC --- which would mostly benefit people like me, who don't need the help.
"Amtrak operates corridor routes (covering distances under 400 miles) and long-distance routes (over 400 miles in length)...Virtually all of Amtrak's 44 or so routes lose money but the long-distance routes lose the most...
In congressional testimony the DOT IG stated that long-distance trains accounted for only 15% of total inter-city ridership.."

http://lieberman.senate.gov/documents/crs/amtrak.pdf
" But being a really great business guy, on the level of someone like Richard Branson, is really hard."

Well then, the analogy (for programming) should be to become someone like Ken Thompson . And that's equally hard (or harder).

Being a really great X guy, is really hard, for most values of X.
This statement confuses me. Looking at that map, it looks like most of the rail is being put in places that could most use it. There are a few confusing places (like the Buffalo-Cleveland being left out), but for the most part it seems to be linking the major city centers for those areas together. I do wonder about that little Florida circuit, especially why it isn't being connected to the rest of the huge Houston->All of the East coast circuit. I also wonder why Kentucky/Tennessee are left out.
Wrong, misguided or they talked themselves in to a tight spot and it got a lot tighter because of the media. Hard to tell which without more information.
If you could lower cost-to-orbit by a factor of a hundred, you wouldn't need a NASA prize to make money!

Prizes can be a good idea, but not for things so spectacularly easy to monetize.
I far prefer driving to riding a train (or flying, except for the first and last 20 minutes). Sitting in a train is not stress-free, for one thing. There are all these people around you, who you can't just ignore completely, and yet with whom you are not friends. It's like being at a party where you know no one, and parties are hard enough to deal with even if you know everyone at them.

Secondly, there's not really enough room to work unless you can do your work on a phone; even if there were enough room for a decent-sized laptop between you and the seat in front, you'd still have to put everything away and get up whenever the people away from the aisle wanted out, which is every 15 minutes or so, seemingly. This problem also exists for reading.

Also, when you're driving, there's always the possibility of stopping at something that interests you, or taking a different route. You are in control of your own movement, in a way that you aren't at all in a train, where you can't realistically choose to do something differently. Even a comfortable jail is still jail (though Amtrak, at least, is no more comfortable than business-class flying), and while you might choose to put yourself in a traveling jail for 12 hours, the lack of freedom to choose differently halfway through will, of course, wear on you.

I took a train when I moved from Alabama to the DC metro area last year, and I quickly realized I should have flown. There was absolutely nothing to recommend the experience over flying, which is very similar, except much shorter and somewhat cheaper (and Amtrak, the train I took, is subsidized, so a train that actually reflected its true cost in the ticket price would be, at current standards, an economy-class experience with a luxury-class price).
keyist: This would seem to make sense, but the Kindle has completely changed how I read and despite my fondness for the physical sensations of paper, I just don't have the patience for its limitations anymore. It's like using a 90s mobile brick when you've seen the iPhone.

My understanding is this is a common reaction. Also note related death of reading, death of concentration memes/psychology.
The other reasons being that they provide a mostly terrible service that is impractical for routine use to an uninteresting market with an ineffective pricing scheme. But yeah, pork is bad too.
Nice to see some new activity on the dropbox blog. I'm looking forward to downloading their iPhone app.
> Won't this create more urban sprawl?

No, because train stations are usually in or very close to inner city centers (airports are noisy, generate loads of waste and need enormous amounts of space so you have to get them out and far). In fact if done correctly it would probably bring americans back to city centers, closer to the stations and better able to hop onto a train and ride to the next town, 200 miles and an hour away.

> I'm also not convinced they won't have security screening for the high speed rail.

I don't know of any european nation with anything even remotely close to airport security in train stations. In France, you can literally arrive a minute before departure and hop on your high-speed train (it's not recommended because the risk of missing your train is high, but it's possible).
This seems completely backwards to me --- I've gotten real work done every time I've ridden the Acela, and I can't think of a single line of code I've ever written on a plane.
That assumes that Github is slow because of their hosting (Engineyard) and not because of how it's written.

I dunno, it could go either way for me: "Engineyard drops Github for being too costly" vs "Github needs better hosting, so we're dropping Engineyard"
Why not try and get one high-speed rail link right before trying to build them all over the country?

The Acela Express can go up to 150mph, but it is prohibited from going that speed in a lot of areas, and from what I've read it isn't very reliable.

http://is.gd/39PZO

Of course, the Obama Administration will avoid any project where they can be expected to have made measurable progress in six months. It's much easier for them to just keep talking about what they're working on than it is to actually fix anything.
If you go with an evented architecture like this, you have to use it for pretty much all I/O or the whole thing falls apart. Lack of drivers and protocols has been a large barrier to adoption.
Like this?

http://github.com/richhickey/clojure/blob/26f5aed73c9cc2959b...

http://paste.lisp.org/display/84027

It's coming,

Rich
Specifically, from the outside looking in, exactly what you described is(was?) a mess. Last I looked it was confusing as to what I should use, what would be supported in the future, who (web or web2) had what feature, and what even worked. That was quite a while a go (like over a year). More recently, talk at pycon suggested things had not improved much, but I haven't verified that. I am open to the possibility that things have improved since I last looked, particularly given the overall quality of twisted stuff.

I still wonder tho, if this would be good to graft into twisted?
When evaluating hosting providers, the quote Engineyard gave us was tremendously expensive.

They offered a great deal of value-added services, but we found that it would be cheaper to go with the second-most expensive option (Amazon EC2) while also hiring a qualified full-time sysadmin.

Whether this was a wise choice or not given our experience with EC2 is up for debate. But even if we had gone with Engineyard and had no problems at all it would be hard to justify a couple developer's salaries for it.
A Jeez.eu implementation of an URL Shortener
Building an URL shortener in a rather new way... Not so great code, but a not so aware user can learn some things
So, I don't know that much about what train service between NYC, Philly, Boston, and DC was like before the Acela, but I do know that everyone in my company that travels between those locations uses Acela almost exclusively. I know it can't do max speed all the way between NYC and Boston, but it's still the best way to get from NYC to Boston.
Well, my own trip was stressful, cramped, and otherwise uncomfortable, and I wouldn't bother to repeat it. If I really needed to spend that time coding and had no option but to do it while en route, I'd much rather spend it mostly in an airport. I've never actually done any coding while on a train or a plane, though I have while riding shotgun in a car across the West, while my wife-at-the-time drove. :)
Very excited to see GitHub continuing to grow and EngineYard and GitHub handling their barter deals so cordially. Both companies are class acts!!!
++. When I got my NY->MD travel paid for, I always went with Acela. About two hours from Penn Station, and you're in BWI. No airport or driving hassle.
It's like when your boss let's you "resign" so you don't have to tell a future employer you were fired. EY was fired.
Maybe the population in the South will increase as a result?
Well, EY could make Github fast again by providing more resources. But then, someone would have to pay for the additional resources. EY doesn't think it's worth it, and Github can get the additional resources elsewhere for cheaper (EY is expensive, because you pay for premium support).

It seems like it's more about the fit between the companies, than any particular performance issues.
"A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."

-That's the definition I'm using. Lack of competence or knowledge can both be causes of stupidity, but that's not really the point I'm making.

My point is that whatever the cause, stupidity is not a constant. It is situational and also varies over time. Smart people act stupidly from time to time as well. Additionally, when you take an action that is a gamble, sometimes you lose out even if the odds where in your favor. That's not stupidity, even though by this strict definition of the term it could be defined as such since loss has occurred with no benefit.
Its probably more about costs for both sides. I doubt that EY is _slow_ without regard to cost. Just that instead of rewritting GitHub's web app to deal with inherent performance issues, it makes more sense to throw more hardware at the problem. There does come a point where owning more of your server stack makes more financial sense.
EtherPad now supports embedding in other web pages
But being an awesome excellent programmer doesn't mean guaranteed success in any real measurable way. Maybe some recognition from peers, but certainly not in monetary terms. Begin an awesome excellent business guy does mean success in a measurable way.