skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I agree with the admonishment (see also http://lesswrong.com/lw/km/motivated_stopping_and_motivated_...), I think the PBS example is bad.

The question of how we trade off different methods of achieving broadly humanitarian ends is a different question than how we trade off broadly humanitarian ends against different ends. If the only case being made for the air strikes is humanitarian, then it makes sense to see if it's reasonable humanitarian bang for the buck. Of course, there are other ends that the air-strikes might serve, though I have no sufficiently informed opinion on their effectiveness (or counter-productiveness).
The same kinds of dismissals were probably said about everyone who tried to make an airplane. Someone eventually made it work, though.
debt and other posters:

Check out SportsData - developer.sportsdatallc.com - free trials, cost effective plans for startups.
The thing is that Bitfinex only reports their leveraged volume every hour so you can't really pinpoint the margin calls.

Especially since bfxdata is a third party site.
This is very interesting and intellectually stimulating, but none of this matters in the current season where Mercedes has a vastly superior engine and is winning races by 10s of seconds, not milliseconds.
Nah. Just a very risky investment. ITER uses "safe" physics that we know how works - it's a magnificent engineering exercise, but there are no new insights in fusion per se required. These guys seem to be aiming for an alternative solution with more eccentric science behind it. It will probably not work out, but neither does most start-ups.
Start learning about meditation, but like, for real. I went through the same "mid life crisis" (I'm 23) and it helped me immensely. Especially vipassana. I'm still a massive massive newbie but I can get a tiny tiny grasp of what true happiness is. Startups are an amazing work environment but they're also incredibly stressful and sometimes just shade away what's the real meaning of life. Building startups, optimizing UI/UX, etc etc etc is NOT real life. Just my 2 cents
Personally, what concerns me most often in argument these days isn't any sort of peer to peer inconsistency, but that argument often takes place in and is hurt by the broadcast mesh of blog posts, responses to blog posts, comment sections and tweets.

In isolation, any two peers are either going to fail to negotiate entirely or converge in short order.

There's little hope for convergence of vocabulary or context much less rigor among the chatter of a hundreds, thousands or millions of nodes trying to dictate the protocol. More likely, you end up with a split brain where each island establishes its own consensus totally apart from the other.
Interesting idea, but I suspect there would be a lot of retailers who would vehemently oppose this e.g. Apple opposing anything that might make their customers aware of where the labor and materials to make their iPhone come from.

Your concluding statement about this knowledge affecting your choices would probably be a nightmare for these retail giants who might fight tooth and nail to stop this.
holograham is correct.

The USA does not need a high-speed rail system. The interstate system and airport network is sufficient. Between high trafficked short-distance corridors? Fine.

What the USA needs is modern commuter rail supported by a network of private short-trip mini-buses. This would have the most significant impact for lowest cost.
> But consider -- how do you value-add a public domain work without getting into copyright problems?

You curate them and offer collections based on theme.

You typeset them carefully and print them on nice paper.

You digitally typeset them and give them a carefully created CSS file.
Manipulating their perception of you by taking advantage of social cues.

I'm fine with people wanting to dress nicely as long as they realize it's total bullshit that people are judged by their clothes, but want to take advantage of it anyway. It's just human hacking.

I do feel a bit bad when dressing nicely, because I worry that I am contributing to the continuation of the practice of judging people by their clothing.
is this the equivalent of throwing shit at the wall and see what sticks?

why do vcs with a specialty in software suddenly stray into completely unknown territory? nothing left to fund in software? rarely does this end well.
You know fusion reactors burn fuel like any other power plant, right?
Well put. In live in Denver, high-speed rail doesn't mean much to me. Plane travel is simply faster for almost any trip I'd want to make.
This is somewhat true in the US as well even for not-so-high-speed trains. Acela is priced to compete with air. It's about 2x the price of the Northeast Regional Amtrak trains even though it only shaves maybe 25%-35% (1-1.5 hours for Boston to NY) off the time .

And, actually, for longer routes (e.g. Boston to Chicago), even regular trains are only competitive with planes at best--and if you want a sleeper car for a 20 hour trip you can be looking at $1,000 one way.
I worked in the Yahoo Stores team between 2005-2008. At that time it was known as Yahoo Merchant Solutions. Most of the features they've mentioned in today's announcement were already present back then. And yes, this is the same PG's viaweb.
And rail can be maglev, monorail, hyperloop - whatever is the most economical. As long as terminals are supported by frequent ground transit to fill the gap.
I was feeling the much same way when I was 27. I had a lot of ambitions, but my financial obligations (and weak resume at the time) prevented me from doing what I thought I was capable of.

I saved up some money, then took the best paying, most flexible–yet reliable–part time work I could find. I got really lucky and found a boss who was very understanding of my situation.

For the next few years I was fairly broke, but by having a steady part time job, I was able to swing back and forth between developing new skills, working on my own SAAS business, and freelancing when things got tight.

My business didn't hockey stick, but it had a steady bootstrapped upward incline. When it was making enough to pay the bills, I stopped freelancing, then eventually quit my part time job.

I traveled overseas a bunch, toured with my crappy band a few times, did all the other stuff on my bucket list, then bought a house and had a kid. Business is still good and consistent. I'm not rich, but I'm not poor either.

I'm 35 now. I spend my days hanging out with my son and answering the occasional email, hacking at night or whenever. I've never been happier than I am these days.

Sometimes, I wish I could travel back in time 10 years so that I could tell younger myself, "hey, things will turn out really well." Would've made the trip here a lot easier.
The "default" in many configs is still actually 1024 bits, which is of course too small.
If bitcoin was used as widely as the USD this would never have happened. It happened because of weak depth in the bitcoin markets (i.e. not that many people are trading it).
>that vast majority of those commutes are 50 miles or less. High speed rail only becomes cost and time effective over much longer distances. Which fraction of the population need to frequently travel to cities greater than 50 miles away?

Maybe the distance of those commutes are related to the times it takes? Would the average commute grow in distance if the time decreased?
I found something similar at my university where you could underflow the unsigned short they used to track your quota.

The system would of course refuse any single job that took you over quota but, if you wrote a script that pounded a few jobs slightly below quota right after each other, two or more would get through, underflow and you'd suddenly have 65k pages left.

I know when you left the school you could get reimbursed for any remaining pages left on your ID but I wasn't crazy enough to try that. 65k * $0.05 = a chat with the police, I'd guess.
$1.5 million from YC is known as "smart money". You don't use smart money as runway, you use it to build runway.
Why it's so hard to catch your own typos is that, being the amazing hacker that you are, you're too cool for word processors with spell (and grammar) checkers.

You've tried the command line spell checkers, but they all irksomely need to be taught to ignore various tokens emanating from your markup language, requiring you to drag a custom dictionary from account to account, system to system, or else do it all over again.

Plus all spell checkers of all kinds choke on the technical language you use, especially the acronyms and strange names: OSPF, ISDN, XML, Yacc, GCC, C++, ... All have to be painstakingly marked as valid, to be ignored (as long as you're on the same computer with the same dictionary for the same spell checking application).

Spell checking technical writing is a pain in the butt, and so sometimes it doesn't get done.
Right now we just buy deuterium off the shelf, it is low cost and plentiful. You can get deuterium by electrolysis of heavy water, see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_water
The highways didn't build themselves either, you know.
especially for a product that is just hoping to break even on power generation.
The U.S. is largely built out already.

So look at Japan. Japan is 152,000 ish square miles.

The United States is 3,717,000 sq miles that are already crisscrossed with Interstates, plus a great deal of air travel infrastructure, plus low-speed rail.

It may not be obvious, but rail crashed in the U.S. More
than once. There were worthless railroad stock certificates in many attics. These now have actual numismatic value. Then it crashed again after Eisenhower built the Interstate.

China is 3,704,000 sq. miles but doesn't have Interstates to the same extent that the U.S. does.

The U.S. does pretty well with low speed rail for freight and to a lesser extent, passenger service. But the infrastructure in the U.S. is based on 50 year old technology. China should be able to do much better and by doing so, the U.S. should develop a twinge of envy and possibly emulate them, if it makes sense.

The U.S. should ( IMO ) do a lot more "moon shot" things but it didn't work out. I watched this in real time after the moon landing. The shuttle was cool and all, but it was nothing compared to what could have been. We said "BTDT" and went to the disco.

When it comes down to it, the U.S. is a lot about granite countertops and not much else. I will not say why I think that is.

But the geometry of the way the U.S. is laid out means that you can spend a great deal on air transport before you get to break even with high-speed rail.
> California's high-speed rail progress—its proposed San Francisco-to-Los Angeles line remains the only truly fast train project in the country—is the exception that proves the rule; that state's size makes it no example for the rest of the nation.

California's rail plan is a lie and a joke. It won't end up being "high speed" rail. It's a waste of taxpayer money. It's another way for politicians to line the pockets of their contributors.

Rail line won't meet target travel time.

http://articles.latimes.com/2014/mar/27/local/la-me-bullet-t...

It will cost more than proposed to the voters.

http://californiawatch.org/dailyreport/cost-high-speed-rail-...

http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_22929875/california-high-speed...
> High speed rail is an order of magnitude more expensive than interstate highways.

Only when being installed. When operating, the true cost per passenger mile is much lower than for interstate highways and cars. It's best to avoid misleading economic comparisons.

A bus is more expensive than a car, but the cost per passenger mile is much lower.

A commercial airliner is hugely more expensive than a car, but an airplane ride from A to B is cheaper than an equivalent car journey for most trips.

> The traffic is mostly local commuter traffic that high speed rail would not solve.

False choice. Cities have sophisticated, multi-level rail and surface mass transit systems for a reason -- they make economic sense.

> Roads are much more democratic -- they are available to anyone with a car.

I have to ask -- who are you working for? Your arguments are all paper-thin, easily torn to pieces. Roads and cars are democratic? More democratic than a seat in mass transit?
Google uses standard off-the-shelf sata drives too.

Too many disk failures to be worth spending money on the expensive "enterprise" drives when a standard SATA drive will due the job just fine (especially in arrays like this -- plenty of spindles to get performance)
Youtube = tv + iTune
The electric, self-driving cars we will certainly have in less time than this rail system could be built will be using existing infrastructure - the highway system - to transport us, congestion-free and at higher speeds, to absolutely any city on the map - whether they have a train station or not.

Why waste money on a rail system when the whole country is going to look like the car scenes in Minority Report in a couple decades?
4 Steps to Knowing Your Users as Well as You Know Your Code – Inside Radialpoint
Hey,

I went to a firm right after studying because in Canada you're required to (it's called "articling").

I run a few online services and it's certainly possible to do that while working other jobs. Maybe you could build your service on the side and see if it's got legs?

I wouldn't recommend starting a law practice right out of school (if that's possible in your jurisdiction). It's good to get at least some experience/credibility.

I think it'll be tough to try to answer this post thoroughly so please feel free to email me at addison@cameronhuff.com if you'd like to chat further (email or Skype).
> For the operating system, we use FreeBSD version 9.0. This was selected for its balance of stability and features, a strong development community and staff expertise.
...or due to the less restrictive licensing, it's ok netflix everybody does it...
It's too bad that current media formats don't allow you to scrub (at least, the ones I usually come across - I have no idea what makes a compression format "scrubbable"). IIRC, this was one of the selling points of Quicktime.
Mentioning minimum-wage laws as a contributing factor isn't quite 'blaming' them. Also, even minimum-wage proponents can (and often do) admit there are tradeoffs involved with such mandates, they just think those tradeoffs are worth it.

You've guessed right that I don't personally think the tradeoffs of price-controls on wages are worth it. (Among other problems, the very young & low-skilled, who get priced out of essential starter jobs, are hurt more than those who remain employed at the higher wages are helped.) But we don't have to agree on that to reach common understandings on other particulars of how employers and employees adjust to constraints.
Hell yeah.

The key to GitHub issues is that they are fast. I can make a ticket in seconds, which means I will make a ticket. Loading time is close to imperceptible on slow phone company DSL or slow phone company wireless.

Compare that to JIRA where making an issue involves looking at a few screens that look like the Space Shuttle cockpit controls, having to fill out a bunch of mandatory options that involve a huge cognitive load because they are incorrectly ontologized so that none of them really apply to the ticket you're putting in. Then you're waiting 20 seconds for pages to load even over a "business class" 50 Mbit/s connection.

Now maybe some of that is the fault of the customers and not Altassian because maybe they run it on premise and are running it on a ten year old "server"; yes, once in my life I saw somebody load a JIRA page in under two seconds. Similarly, it's the customer who added a bunch of screwy categories and made the manually. And it's not just JIRA, all the others ones are just as bad maybe worse.

I remember one product that made a big deal that it supported the agile thing and allegedly you could put an estimate in and then say you worked 4 hours on it, except that if you tried to do that it seemed anything would happen like maybe the estimate would be extended by 4 hours or the estimate would be set to 4 hours.

All of those features are "nice to have", but speed and simplicity is a "must have"
Can someone with some knowledge on nuclear energy explain to me how this solution varies from say, General Fusion (http://www.generalfusion.com)? They're a company more local to me, and while these companies are looking to accomplish the same thing, their approaches are wildly different.
Twitter Just did Something Great
Soylent? I haven't got my shipment though.
"Besides, why does it even matter if we enjoy something nice because society tells us it should make us happier?"

If you REALLY enjoy it, that's great. But most of the research on the relationship between stuff/trappings and happiness finds that there isn't really any correlation. You're trained by evolution, society, and marketers to want these things, but (unless you're anomalous), they don't impact your happiness.

Meanwhile, 20% of households spend more than they make, unemployed millennials spend ~$800/month on discretionary spending, and half of american households save no money at all.
In my experience with a certain retailer, the former is a decision made for you: they'll schedule you for 32-34 hours if they schedule you at all. As soon as you introduce any friction outside of what they're legally obligated to accept, you get squeezed out.
Not a fan of the essay style where you dismiss a bunch of possible reasons with single sentences, then spend paragraphs talking about the one part you want to talk about. It overly simplifies issues.
The criticism here is funny! You need to keep a few things in mind. Yahoo has a HUGE small business audience. Most of that audience isn't anywhere near as technical as most people here. They don't give a shit about the technology behind the curtain. They also don't give a shit about how trendy it is. They just want it to work and to them, Yahoo is a trustworthy partner.
Actually it turns out they don't really have a need for most of the features of ZFS. So they don't use it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL5U4wr86L4
Life doesn't have an award ceremony at the end, so any measurement you make of your success is pressure you're putting on yourself. Nobody else, including your family, cares about the "great" things you could be doing.

Unless you subscribe to one of the many religions that tell you that there IS an award ceremony after you die, you can rest assured that your presence here has absolutely no point or goal. To some people this is extremely depressing, but I firmly believe this and it's the most liberating thing in the world. There is nobody I have to impress, no goal I have to meet, and no level of success I have to achieve before I'm happy.

That's liberating because my life is more like play than work. You ever play a pick-up game of a fun sport, where you don't keep score and you just enjoy the competition with friends for its own sake? That is ALWAYS better than organized competition with awards and a goal, and I've done both.

I'm not saying check out and smoke pot all day, unless that's really your thing long term (probably isn't). But nobody gives a shit about how successful you are but you.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
#STOPIS.ORG
So many straw men here...

Nobody is saying that evolution is selecting for some nebulous sense of "improvement." Reproductive success leads to traits being passed on to successive generations, and general survival is merely one precondition to reproduction. The human impulse to jockey for status is a reproductive strategy.
Expected value.
They break even and are billionaires. They manage to create 2+ EROEI and we are talking trillions.
Milton Friedman is famous for saying the inflation of the dollar is exclusively controlled by the FED, but that isn't 100% true today. There are other branches of government that capture back large amounts of the printed paper from operations that are illegal. So in a sense, the "war on drugs" could be keeping inflation lower than it would be without it. For inflation to be felt the money has to be in circulation. Also, when the US broke away from the gold standard and printed a lot of money for police actions, it took about 10 years for the inflation to become rampant. It is important to realize this was before the crack wave.
http://do-better.herokuapp.com/
The same attach was levied against AC Power.

In general the goal is for an exothermic reaction. It should be possible. Perpetual Motion Machine would be one that could sustain itself without fuel. This one can't. It has to use heavy water and helium to form the plasma. To be an actual perpetual motion machine, the system would have to create enough energy to be converted into hydrogen (E=MC^2 and all), then feed itself with the new fuel. Even at 8 times the energy output, they can't get enough energy to create parts of the fuel.
Been a while since I played Asteroids... is this any different from the original, other than the asteroid shapes?

Very clean code btw.
> Helion CEO David Kirtley says that his company can do it in three.

Three... years? Decades? Days? Millennia?
No, they're not quacks.

They might be a little foolish expecting (and suggesting they can deliver) net positive fusion reactors in three years, but what they're doing is solid physics. It's a high risk, high reward investment and I'm glad it's happening even if I don't think it's likely to work because someone _soon_ is going to be successful in creating a commercially viable fusion reactor, and more separate groups trying makes the chances of success higher.
No question that somebody is cheating or that the teacher should do something. Just saying, the algorithm is punitive for a reason.
Is "subsistence farmer" a metaphor for financially independent? Otherwise I don't see why people would want to be subsistence farmers.
Nature had a fun article a few weeks back on the current trickle of VC into fusion startups.

http://www.nature.com/news/plasma-physics-the-fusion-upstart...

It's certainly interesting, and I wish these companies all the best. The consternation I see occasionally over a company like this getting a (relatively) small amount of funding confuses me. There are so many software startups that receive equivalent or greater funding that eventually die or pivot into something else. Here, you have physical cutting edge engineering with potential implications that blow something like Slack, or Square, or even Uber away. Personally, I love seeing companies in the physical space get in on today's Silicon Valley high.

Semi-related, but I've been to NIF (National Ignition Facility), since I spent a summer at LLNL, and the inside of that facility is like the dream vision of every little kid that was into science and science fiction. Unfortunately (as my physicist significant other who was not working there found out) the public tours are far more restricted and you don't get to see the cool stuff.
Right, English doesn't have a future tense (in the sense of tense as marked by inflection). So what's the contrast of note? That the one sentence marks the future by use of a modal auxiliary (in addition to the explicit "tomorrow"), while the other marks the future only by explicit description of the time "tomorrow"? Mark me as highly skeptical that this is of any significance...
>>Gender Diversity in Non-Tech Positions

and Twitter is 50% Male and 50% female!That;s like they aimed at 50% and achieved that!