skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Paris-Lyon TGV averages 140MPH. Wuhan-Guangzhou managed to average 195, but was reduced to 186. Beijing-Tianjin 146. Japan has 130-145MPH. So:

* None of these average speeds would make Chicago-Houston competitive with air. Even if you add the hour on both ends for the air trip, the fastest train in China operating above the Chinese speed limit still loses to Southwest Airlines.

* None of these average speeds make a 300MPH average speed train any more realistic.
Is it just me or do the times listed in this article seem implausible?
A cautionary tale about subscription services and how not to shut down a startup
Here's what Uber can learn from McDonald’s
Introducing Containerville
Ask HN: Who uses Chaos Monkey?
The Chaos Monkey idea is amazing, but I haven't heard of many people using it besides Netflix.
I'd never come across the term "ridership" before. What a wonderful word!

I note that Google says it's a North American term (in Australia and England this would probably be termed "patronage") but I may start using it. It has a Samuel Clemensy feel to it, although dictionary.reference.com dates it to 1962.[1]

[1] http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ridership
I've heard similar arguments made against BASIC, C and Pascal - "learn assembler, real programmers code in assembler, you need to know assembler to understand what's really happening".

Good to know now at least C is allowed. We're going somewhere :)

As to losing interest in programming because Python is too easy - BASIC on 8bit computers was gateway drug to programming for me and most of my friends, I think kids like programming being too easy (instant feedback etc).
Well it is literally perpetual motion.

And yes as far as exact temperature it's about qualitative differences, not quantitative ones.

The first revolutionary hurdle is making it work on a desktop with a simple fridge-style cooling mechanism.

The second hurdle is making it work around 40-50C, then your phone and almost everything can take advantage of it.
My Text-To-Speech web widget. I'd love any feedback
Right, since I have the exact opposite experience and I can find a logical explanation for it.

I learned to drive in an automatic transmission car. I was still in terror when first learning to drive that car. Later on I got a new car, and since manual transmissions where cheaper I got a manual one. I was again terrorized every time I had to stop and get into first gear again, or when I was stopped in a hill. I can only imagine the absolute nightmare I would have been trough if I had to learn both how to operate the stick shift AND the rest of the car and laws of the road at the same time. I actually think progressive learning was better for me.

Same with programming, I learned GW Basic as a kid doing games and what not. Then switched to Pascal, then C and then ASM. I can only imagine how motivating it would have been to 10year old me having to write pages and pages of ASM just to do the simplest thing. Instead learning a easy high level language helped me stay motivated and learn progressively getting into harder stuff little by little.
Do these people have the editorial freedom to criticise their major advertisers? Or potential advertisers?

Is their creativity, in fact, funnelled consciously or unconsciously into selling over-priced shit to people who don't need it?

Would there be more or less creativity in the world if it wasn't focussed on making a few hand-picked, advertiser-friendly people into elite-level, rich straight-white-men?

I don't think global creativity goes hand-in-hand with advertising. In my opinion, advertising just sucks the soul out of it. So, I disagree back.
I live in a rural enough community in North America that traditional cellular providers don't see us as a large enough market. A couple of these access points could go a long way towards solving some of our connectivity problems.

@shaddi How would the billing work with subscribers who connect with phones from other carriers?
nope. no one can: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/06/...
Just another bubble in the making -- just be ready to pull out at the right time.
For the brilliant the starting point won't matter. For the average getting to results fast will.

Too many people have mental blocks of "programming is too hard". That is, until they see 2+2 or print 'hello world' and it just works.

Far more average people out there than brilliant, let's focus on those and let the geniuses fend for themselves, i'm sure they'll do fine.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/nyregion/remote-controlled...

A remote-controlled copter killed this poor fellow.
In all likelihood they are going to open your CSV file in Microsoft Excel 2004, or if you're lucky Microsoft Excel 2007

When did he write this? It says Nov 2014 at the top but that doesn't seem accurate.
> The important upside is that SV is the center of the universe for interesting computer science work.

This is so true! (Even by my limited experience) Comparing job offerings in my home area vs offerings of any random company in the valley, the SV company wins. It's unbelievable how few interesting CS jobs there are in the rest of the world in comparison.
Poverty for a lot of the world is not a choice. In America, we are lucky enough that it does not have to be your only choice if you can make wise decisions: Get an education, avoid drugs, avoid getting pregnant, work hard, spend your money on only the things you need to live.
Why are "sound walls" flat, rigid walls. Why not contoured more like a sound testing room (at least above normal crash height).

I've often wondered if you could efficiently capture usable energy from motorway noise. I can hear a motorway now, it's about 1km away down a substantial dip, there are houses and quite a few trees between us and I'm behind double-glazing. To power a speaker to make that sort of noise takes a lot of electricity, doing the reverse seems like it could at least power some street lighting.
xls is not just one format. There are several formats which Excel will understand, that uses that extension. One of them is a real simple xml-based format (SpreadsheetML), that is way easier to generate than proper excel files and has most of the features you need (At least for data transport purpose). Highly recommend using it.
There was a similar story a couple weeks ago on HN where someone remapped the video from a time lapse of hand drawing. Can't find the link.
They shouldn't. The DC-NY route generates an operational surplus, and the states along the route should shoulder the capital costs by issuing bonds, they way they do for any other infrastructure project.
He also mentioned pandas, which isn't that old. So, it's probably hyperbole.
Let me ask you this:

If Emacs and all of its extension code was completely rewritten in Scheme, what would be the point of sticking with Elisp? And how would using a Scheme-only Emacs be "GNU Emacs's suicide"?

What concrete value does Elisp add over Scheme?

CL vs Scheme, I could see an (unconvincing to me) argument for, but Elisp? Elisp?

Don't get me wrong. I'd much rather use Elisp than most any other non-lispy language. I just don't see anything in it to recommend it over a modern Scheme like Guile.

But I'm open to being shown the errors of my ways. What's so great about Elisp? Please enlighten me.
This is just really good, really well explained, and full of truth.

No further comment. There is absolutely nothing bad about learning the inner workings of your machines. Go even lower than C if you can -- learn assembly, learn about logic gates and memory, learn some electrical engineering, and the physics underpinning it. It just makes the magic more amazing.

And you may think it is a waste of time, but you have to have a little bit of faith that it isn't. Because you will be a different kind of programmer once you cross that threshold.
It is absolutely a solved problem, but printing hex floats into JSON or a CSV isn't going to be great when you need to re-import the data somewhere.
"we need to fight back those instincts, because they are not based on data. Sure, they seem logical, and we can make eloquent parallels with stick shift driving, and we can all remember that one programmer who started as a Python programmer and totally sucked, so of course learning Python first doesn't make great programmers - but at the end of the day, we need data. It's all pseudo-science otherwise, and it's not any better reasoning than pop psychology."

I've interviewed (and worked with) a lot of programmers now, and I can definitively say that the best ones know how to program in C, and the worst ones do not. I'm guessing that Evan Miller has had similar levels of exposure to good programmers and bad programmers. I make no claims of causality, but the correlation is a damned strong hint.

Said another way: data actually is the plural of anecdote, for sufficiently large values of N.
While we're on the subject of abused words, calling RC-machines/devices "robots" drives me a little nuts. To my mind, it's not a robot if someone is standing there with a remote-control initiating its every move. It's just an RC vehicle.

But, you see this even in competitions wherein schools will build various RC-devices to face off in "robot battles". It's cool that they're imagining and building this stuff, and it's a lot of fun, but they are NOT robots!
One of China's Youngest Internet tycoon Yu Jiawen urges young to be audacious
In my experience, pure functional programming, combined with Haskell's relatively permissive syntax, allows for very natural-language-like and well-structured programs.

Languages like Agda can do this even more impressively. You can do stuff like write

if_then_else_ : Bool -> a -> a -> a

And you can split up the "if", "then", and "else" and put the arguments where the underscores are.
It's not about what they're useful for; it's about how they make you think about the whole. It is a more complete understanding.

Knowledge does not need to be directly applicable to be immensely valuable.
I think you should learn C to learn how computers work and learn Haskell to learn how languages work. Those two are remarkably different ball games despite the supposed identification of the two that persists today.
Gophers say idiomatic go. We don't need a fancy shorthand for it (also all the viable possibilities are terrible ;).
Just expose an odata endpoint than can be consumed by excel, various other analytic tools as well as whatever programming language you want since it is just rest.
Rosetta was covered on TV news, hardly off-topic.
I'd expect racism to be on topic in the wider context of minorities in tech, but what do I know?
You absolutely don't need to solve complex differential equations for this purpose, unless you want a closed form. Let's be more imaginative: Numerical analysis of the same model would be fine for high school level and is likely to give a great and relevant insight into mechanics.

Why is the closed form considered a prerequisite for a numerical approximation? Just because we ultimately end up at the latter, doesn't mean it should be taught in that order.

I may be mistaken about the practitioners but I doubt many Physics PhDs are short of work. It certainly seems like employers want more of them.
I think we're talking about first languages, which many people will be introduced to in either college, advanced placement courses, or standard high school classes. The USA has generally poor vocational training opportunities, especially for coding. If we're talking about learning a language on your own, there is no way to force anyone to learn the specific language you want them too, so going down that rabbit hole seems moot.

Some people will have the drive and opportunity to learn to code in C, just like the author had his father's car with a manual transmission and parents who forced him to learn how to use it. However, not everyone is coming from the same background.

Joe Nerd Jr could probably start with C. Joe Public Jr probably needs an easier introduction. We don't have med students immediately dissecting cadavers, nor do we have basic math classes that start you off with calculus. While some people will feel starting with these advanced classes makes you understand the subject better, many people will bomb out completely and become alienated with the topic. Perhaps some like the concept of survival of the fittest, but it may not be beneficial to society in the long run.

Most computer science students end up in the programming field. They do not stay in academia perpetually. Usually if someone wants to become a pro coder, they're told to go get a BS in CS. We could debate what a True Computer Scientist is, but in the end most people are there because they like technology and want a well paying job. Some just won't be hardcore enough for some people's liking.
What would be necessary to drive the price per base station down further?
I think It would be much better in the long run if you were to compile a wiki first, howto and bestpractices for the masses on your blog and then try to apply your cumulative knowledge and expertise into an alpha(beta) book as the technology itself matures. While I understand your passion about docker and you want to contribute while making money, I would also think about the audience who invests time and their money on a topic that is constantly evolving.
> Do these people have the editorial freedom to criticise (sic) their major advertisers? Or potential advertisers?

That's actually one of the (uncelebrated) benefits of the exchange landscape. Because advertisers and publishers are so removed from each other, there's 0 risk of editorial freedom being jeopardized.

Honestly, I'm tired of the trite advertising hatred on HN. Advertising is basically the only thing making culture and creative work (from journalism to ballet) available to the general public. A world without advertising would be a much darker one, with entertainment only accessible to the wealthy few who can directly commission creativity.

Advertisers also tend to allow a lot more creative freedom than patrons.
Picking open source technology: pick the community too
pulse typically gives a good indication. https://github.com/stefanpenner/ember-cli/pulse
Meh. I think it is arguable that the code from this article is as easy as it is to understand as much from the prose that goes with it as from the language it is written in. My argument would actually lean towards more so.
screen (and tmux) start a new instance of the shell, which would have no knowledge of the backgrounded process. You'd just see the message "fg: no current job"
Your definition of overdrive is slightly incorrect. Overdrive simply means that the overall ratio between the input to output shafts of a transmission is less than 1.0 (meaning the wheels of the car are spinning faster than the engine).

By this definition the Miata does have an overdrive as most generations have a final ratio of around 0.85 in top gear.
1. Pervasive cashless transactions, years ahead of the US or even the UK means that the need for ATMs is minute. I have withdrawn a total of $290 in 2014 (so far, but we're in December now). $1750 in 2012, $510 in 2013 and now $290. Everything else is contactless/chip/electronic transfers.

2. Only if you use an ATM not run by your bank or not in your bank's network. There's near enough always going to be a cluster of four ATMs corresponding to the four big banks in any area, at least one of which will be free to withdraw from.

3. Get an account with ING Direct and they will refund you any ATM fees, even those charged by other companies.

Disgrace? Please.
Interesting, but I think it has bad side-effects for privacy. I'm guessing this would mean a public mapping of at least full-name => SSN being published. AFAIK there's no such list of names currently -- is there a good reason for that? Would/should this list include more data like date of birth? My understanding is that SSN's from certain eras encode information on the place of birth. Might having a public, nearly unique number of any person allow buying/selling additional data from third parties more easily?
Yep, but it's more like good combined arms operations (the use of multiple combat arms like armor, artillery and air, you might start with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_arms) and a "cooperative" enemy. Like France in WWII.

I get the impression that Saddam's conception of war was strictly WWI era (right down to chemical warfare, although perhaps the issue there is why it wasn't widely used in WWII (ask for details if you're interested)), although this was most relevant in the First Gulf War, where we tricked him into thinking he would receive a frontal attack, and we hooked around his right flank. This avoided the expense of a frontal attack, he was no doubt hoping would cause us problems back home or worse.

For the rematch, well, he certainly had a lot less force, I would suspect the "thunder run" might vaguely resemble Patton's dash after the breakout from Normandy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_S._Patton#Normandy_brea...), or if you want Nazi analogies, the crushing of small/relatively weak countries prior to France.
"Data is ultimately meant to be consumed by people."

I disagree. Information is consumed by people. Data underlies information, and sometimes is mistaken for it. But raw data is absolutely parsed and processed before being consumed by the average audience. Some analytic folk will read raw data, but only to serve a higher level purpose - to answer some question or gain some knowledge.

But in general, data is analyzed and filtered and summarized and visualized before being consumed. This author may just work too close to the data on a day to day basis to realize where the average audience really fits.
The mixfix notation in Agda seems really amazing. I am always wishing I could write code like "add _ to _" or "sort _ by _", etc...
I was doing CSV but couldn't get multiple files into the same sheet (tabs). I had 20 CSVs to download I didn't need 20 different files.

I work in JSON mostly do wrapped the excellent XLSX library it was very useful https://goo.gl/S7rlFm
Not for a side-by-side diff, but I just use this for color diffs:

cdiff() {
diff -u "$@" \
| sed 's/^\(@@ .* @@\)$/'$'\e[36m''\1'$'\e[m''/g' \
| sed 's/^\(-.*\)$/'$'\e[31m''\1'$'\e[m''/g' \
| sed 's/^\(+.*\)$/'$'\e[32m''\1'$'\e[m''/g' \
| less -c -R
}
Quick Search – UI redesign to facilitate sharing links and quick Google searches
First of all, how in the world did we end up down the rabbit hole of the EME holy war? The EME comment was a tiny reference that ultimately had nothing to do with the point of the blog post...

You can do whatever you'd like with your wallet, but you live in a very different reality from most people. There's a reason why GOG can offer "Minecraft: The Story of Mojang" without DRM.

Again, this conversation has nothing to do with the actual blog post in question other than rabbling about something you disagree with. I disagree with you that EME is Satan's binary blob, but this is entirely irrelevant.
Whether you find a closed form solution (and, for most realistic systems you will not) or you want to solve it numerically ... you still need to write a set of differential equations. Before you learn about differential equations, you need to have done some basic calculus. You can not teach high school students what differential equations are, how they describe mechanical systems, and how to solve them numerically. However, using the math they know, you can teach them to find solutions to idealized systems that illustrate conservation of energy and momentum which are fundamental physics concepts.
Ralph H. Baer, Inventor of First System for Home Video Games, Is Dead at 92
I think people are downvoting you because you're post reads something like, "This is neat, but useless and it's been done before."

Fwiw I didn't downvote you, but it'd probably be taken better if you just said something like, "This is really interesting. I'm not sure what I'd use it for personally, but I'm interested in knowing if you had specific use cases in mind, and what sorts of projects are you seeing it be used in now?"

For me, it looks like it'd be handy to use to generate test data and/or to make fun/weird little game apps, but still be able to keep everything in a .net language, since I work for a .net shop. (I could use python or whatever I want, really. we're flexible. it's just nice to keep things uniform)
Out of curiosity, how does one buy spectrum for a device like this? What are the average costs in some countries?
That's a good observation. It should go without saying that recursion can always be expressed iteratively. Lamport is inclined to make observations like this, e.g. his sequential consistency concept which states that concurrency is always equivalent to a serial process. But don't you mean "multiple recursive calls", not specifically two?
As a developer, it hasn't been easy to make an excel file in the past and it's not a core feature for the business so it gets relegated to a mediocre CSV implementation with minimal effort.
I've a different experience. I started with C as my main language. For years I touched C very rarely, and focused on Scheme, FORTH, SmallTalk, Tcl, and other non conventional languages. What I found is that my knowledge of C did not prepared me to understand the higher order abstractions, like call-cc, or the pure nature of object oriented programming (that IMHO you don't capture learning C++, but only with SELF/SmallTalk). Later after learning call-cc or functional programming I could make sense of that language features in a C implementation of the interpreter maybe, but, it is a separated process:

- If you stay low level you don't understand high level abstractions. And this will weight as a negative thing in your C code as well.

- If you stay high level you don't understand how it actually works at the machine level.

You freaking need both. The problem of certain languages is that they are not like C, but they are also not like SmallTalk or Lisp or FORTH. They just resemble a more dynamic version of C, so you don't really gasp fully any of those levels.

However if you pick the languages to learn wisely, the magical thing is that once you take a trip in the higher order abstractions, you return back to C and code in a different way.
CSV export is for Numbers users, I think.

Apple has failed to support OpenDocument Spreadsheets, and their XLS importer regularly crashes altogether for the operations people at my office, though maybe it's super stable elsewhere.
Try http://clipconverter.cc

Online, free.
Interesting.

It would also be a nice exercise to implement all of the internet RFCs, such as an email server, etcetera in Haskell. That's still a bit lacking. And it would be very useful if it existed, IMHO.
At the risk of being perceived to move the goalposts, I think there is a real lesson to engage with: empirically, for large classes of programmers, syntax, uniformity, and absence of boilerplate actually make a larger difference in out-the-gate productivity than many would like to admit. I understand that this isn't a lesson about programming per se, but I think it's a lesson about the practice of programming.

I see this repeatedly in our internship program, where people often ask after we "promote" them to other language work "Why can't XYZ look as clean and simple as Python?". I do think that's a lesson worth learning, and it's a little hard to learn except by osmosis. If I just tell someone "empirically, syntax matters a lot more than you might think in doing real work" it's easy to dismiss as understood-but-not-important. Jonathan Blow has a bit in one of his videos about "understanding" vs "really viscerally understanding", and I think this is one area where the latter simply can't be achieved without direct experience.
Valgrind is wonderful for catching bugs in my C code. It's a shame you even have to use a tool like this, but such are the realities of C programming.
Please don't denigrate what a beginner is currently learning