skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are kidding, right? Do you have any idea of how many hours of lives are lost in traffic? If you sum up all those hours and divide by average lifespan, I bet it comes out to few thousand people getting killed each day.

Trains also hugely impact how much people must pay on housing. In areas with great train network, people can chose to live farther and still can avoid unreasonable commute. Just imagine what if Californians can spend their earnings on meaningful activities rather than just housing.

When I visited Russia, I just began to realize how important is train network and how badly neglected it is in US. Moscow has one of the absolutely best train network anywhere - all built by Soviets. Trains comes every 2 mins, they are fast and there are plenty of routes with plenty of stops to basically go anywhere without wasting your life getting stuck in commute, finding parking and pay bucket loads of money on gas.

In US, governments are extremely inefficient - no matter what party is in White House (this is not to say Russia is better but trains are something they did got right). People are always busy in philosophical issues around abortions, gay marriage, gun rights while doing 3 hours commute one way everyday in frustrating traffic never asking why government isn't fixing it for decades.
Sounds exactly like union types in Ceylon (http://ceylon-lang.org/documentation/1.1/spec/html/introduct...), which is an interesting approach.
Or silk leash.
Most publishers (like the long-tail) cant sell or moderate every single ad. No advertiser these days picks a single site to run on, rather they purchase based on audiences.

Instead, publishers will blacklist certain advertisers but for the most part it's very automated based on context, behavior targeting, and other factors. Also even if a publisher is large enough to do direct deals, they still use the networks to "backfill" the remaining inventory because they would rather make some money than nothing.

With the cost of hosting going down and the growth of blogging platforms like wordpress, medium and others, it's becoming much easier for the long tail to publish. Still hard if they want to actually make money but at least they can publish without a problem today. I'm glad for that progress.

Arguing that ads don't work though, I just dont get it. What are you basing this on? The entire industry has increased by billions in spend, cost per impression is falling because there's so much more inventory and the shift to more performance based pricing. There are still triple digit CPMs depending on the placement + audience + format so it's not like everything is super cheap. If it's some crappy clickbait link running on some shady site, yea it'll be cheap. Buying ads on FT.com is very different.

Ad fraud is a problem sure, the same as fraud is a problem in credit cards. It's just a constant arms race. It's not like the industry is stupid. Please stop thinking that all of the very talented engineers, data scientists and analysts dont know anything. This industry is far more hard data-driven than many others where "gut" powers lots of decisions.

Edit: Side note: I know people hate clickbait headlines and all those crappy gossip articles... but guess why they're always around and sites like BuzzFeed are worth a billion? Because that's what people actually click on and read.
People are complicated, and are at least somewhat irrational. So polling is hard, and is prone to bias and manipulation. But two observations are solid. First, most people are entirely clueless about technical matters. Second, most people believe that meaningful privacy is either impossible or unworkably complicated.

I recall discussion from the mid 90s, as ad-funded commercialization of the Internet accelerated, about impact on privacy. I'm not arguing that there was much privacy in the early Internet. But privacy was another available path. Now there's meaningful privacy only on the alleys and back roads of the Internet.

I don't have any answers. But I do know that meaningful privacy is incompatible with the current ad-funded Internet. Maybe there's a workable way to deindividualize tracking data. Maybe anonymous blockchain nanopayments would work as an alternative. Google ought to take the lead on this, I think.
Three gripes I have with many formal methods projects are (a) choose something about useless to prove, (b) reinvent the wheel unnecessarily, and (c) an assurance argument with huge gaps or on a knockoff of the actual problem. I like that this project does the opposite in each area: a useful algorithm implementation whose proof build on other's projects with end-to-end assurance. Wise. I look forward to reading the paper.

So, what to do next. I suggest working on stuff that isn't getting much attention. For security, realistic proofs are lacking of useful protocols and crypto-constructions from requirements to design to implementation. Also, much foundational software builds on libraries implementing ZIP, PNG, reg ex's, and so on. More verification of those has widespread effect. Program transformations, optimizations of CompCert, integration of covert channel analysis into such tools, more static/dynamic checking, assemblers/linkers, and so on could all use more verification work done with the nice qualities I mentioned about this one. So, any readers thinking of a project might consider the above. That said, it would be nice if this could benefit the average person without formal methods abilities, right?

I thought hard on it. Our systems stuff is usually coded in low-level, imperative languages for performance. Our high assurance work often uses functional programming (or functional style) for specs, tools, and so on. Yet, the limitations and TCB's of those in systems space are huge obstacles. Yet, old Scheme/LISP work showed how to turn a limited functional program into an imperative one step by step by fleshing out its state (among other things). We've also seen metaprogramming & MDD techniques allow us to specify something at a high level with low-level, fast code automatically generated for the target.

I think the trick is to combine all of this: subset of functional programming specifies high-level operation of program and low-level operation of target language (esp fast parts); verification of useful primitives (eg stacks, pointer arithmetic) with high-level interfaces macro-style; a coding style + methodology for going from high functional to low imperative; verified transformations for optimization, macro expansion, and code generation. Each of these exist in some form, most verified in some way. What's left is to verify all of them and their integration. Such an integrated approach might dramatically simplify verification of software by letting developers simply describe it in a high-level, functional way with a step-by-step process to deployment. Verification, depending on talent, might range from manual inspection to machine-checked proofs. Yet, doing it this way should be much easier than converting them to formal verification experts.

What do you developers or formal methods people think of this?
Personally to me that's "ugh." HTML and CSS as a compile target? What's the lowest level primitive in html? A div? A span? ew. It should be compiled to something that has access to primitives such as lines, polygons or pixels.

Compiling to js is ok as that language is as close to the metal as you can get on a vm anyway. So long as performance isn't affected then it's really no different to the developer. Still the platform would be more elegant if it didn't compile to some intermediary high level language.
The calendar has Sunday as the first day of the week. Interesting.
Ask HN: What's the best service for phone number verification?
Considering writing an app with phone number login using a verification system - I was considering rolling my own using Twilio (asking the user to call a number and add a code or get an SMS and enter a code), but I was wondering if there are any better solutions that work OOTB.
Almost every American calendar does to this day.
Would be nice to see some examples of what people don't like about HTML+CSS+JS. I find it quite wonderful.

You can make all kinds of magic happen in a simple text file. In an intuitive way. Want to tell something? Just write it:

This is some text. How easy was that?

Want to show an image? Just a few keystrokes:

<img id=animal src="my_kitten.jpg">

Want to style it? Here we go:

<style>.animal { border: 5px solid green }</style>

Want to change it programmatically? Easy:

<script>document.getElementById("animal").src="my_dog.jpg"</script>

Deployment? Instantly. Developer tools needed? A text editor. Compatibility? Runs everywhere. Speed? Im often shocked, how fast stuff runs these days.

I think we created a paradise. And I enjoy "living" in it every day.
Is ad funded and and privacy really incompatible. For example, radio is a largely ad funded medium, but the technology is inherently private. Tracking might make adds more valuable, but they are not worthless. Especially if you condisder that adviters could still do the type of content driven targeting that they have done on previus mediums (that is to say, it is not a privacy violation to say that the readers of a particular piece of content are interested in that type of content).
Please use common sense; no, the chalkboards have not been "used for 100 years", the school seems to be in the process of replacing the whiteboards and uncovered these boards from underneath their old boards. Hence, the work on them is 100 years old.

"The most important principle on HN, though, is to make thoughtful comments. Thoughtful in both senses: civil and substantial."
how about don't return "text/html" as a response? you're more than welcome to send "application/pdf" instead, and then bitch about all the same problems with PDF.

you don't have options on the front end, because you don't control the front end... your users do. you may think the browsers control the front end, because you're dumb, but it's the users who choose the browsers.

you'd rather provide a native executable to your users that works to your elegant back end tastes? GOOD. now support every version of every OS every one of your users may ever use... and scramble to fix every one of those every week when moronic OS vendors break something else just to ruin your day.

it's like people complaining about mansanto... if you have a better way to feed a billion people TODAY, go ahead and try, and come back for corn when you're broken.
Access to primitives such as lines, polygons or pixels, you say? Canvas, SVG, and WebGL fit that bill.
Added a small code fragment.

(Disclaimer, I'm one of the primary authors of Lasp, @cmeik on Twitter)
Well, grapefruit is food. It's good for you. It has fiber and vitamin C...

Grapefruit I get. Being attracted to men I get (despite the fact that I'm straight). But I don't get stilettos because they just look like they'd be so damn uncomfortable. The only reason I can see to wear them at all is to conform to some societal norm.

If I met a straight woman who claimed to enjoy wearing neck ties I would be equally nonplussed.
> Firstly, the only reason people purchase a stock is for that stock to be worth more in the future, they're taking a risk and making an investment.

Investing for dividend income alone is fine, too.
My main comment addresses some of this. I think the consensus on this is that most software will use other techniques with lower barrier to entry that leverage stuff built with higher assurance. For example, certain imperative (Ada) and functional (Ocaml) seem to prevent all kinds of errors with decent performance. The Middle Way is to make the toolchain and critical libraries high assurance while the developer uses the basic features of the language with a decent software process. The process aims for good requirements, conservative design, reuse of proven implementation strategies, and good coding styles. These get checked, analyzed, and turned into machine code by trustworthy components.

Such an approach knocks out the vast majority of problems. The rest get squeezed out incrementally over time as research and development continues.
Wall street execs want government compensation for bailouts
So it's almost as nice, and almost as safe, as Haskell.
As a contra dancer, I actually find that about an inch of heel elevation in a shoe adds about a +1 or so skill bonus.
Now read the Haskell prologue.
But why would the next fool buy the shares at a higher price?
Maybe a huge amount of legacy code using wavelets that's been debugged and experimentally validated. CFD code checking is laborious and errors often very subtle, and so tends to be pretty conservative.
Openfoam and su2.
> "If I could swap ... language as easily as I can swap between python and ruby on the backend, it would change the face of frontend development and make it more accessible. In fact what if I wanted to develop my own language that interfaces with the rendering engine?"

I'm building this. I've been working on a side project that was my idea of the ideal internet platform, and for a long time I believed that the front end was a lost cause. I've recently figured out the solution. Had quite a eureka moment, in fact. This will be open source but it may be a startup and I'm not going to talk about it until I have a proof of concept... but let me give you an overview:

-- Works on all browsers made since 2013ish

-- You can do absolutely anything you want, in any language you want (though a bit of glue will be necessary to a lower level framework)

-- Initially there will be a basic implementation on a well known and well supported development platform that will bring this close to WYSIWYG and let you write code in more than one language

-- There is a spec for UI elements and you can throw out that initial implementation and write your own complete implementation. This is a non-trivial project, but much easier than creating a browser.

-- The UI can be easily implemented in native forms for native applications. So the "page production code" can be the same for all platforms, web and native, and the "client" code merely translates into the local platforms UI elements (or re-creates the spec's UI elements when there isn't a mapping.)

-- It might suck. This is highly experimental right now.

-- It's no longer a side project, it's my full time obsession.

If you're interested in this, follow: https://github.com/nirvana/nirvana or @NirvanaCore on twitter. Or if email is your thing, check out http://nirvana.io

(ignore what's in that repo right now, the work is happening elsewhere until it's usable for people to start building stuff with. At that point it will be easy enough to wrap your head around that outside contributions will be appreciated. I have a group of hackers I'm working with now, and it's clear things aren't far enough along... yet.)
I view it as a negotiation, and this is me blowing out their proposed deal. Imagine you're sitting at the bargaining table and the first offer the person on the other side gives you is an order of magnitude more than you're willing to pay. Say, they want you to pay $50,000 for a car that you know is only worth $5,000.

This is the point at which you "blow out" their offer. You could say something like, "I don't think we're on the same page at all about the value of this good. I have to walk away if you consider that a reasonable offer."

The other party can counter with, "OK, what are you comfortable with?"

So, right now, in the ads vs. privacy negotiation I've said, "No. You're not even on the right page. You are asking an order of magnitude more than I'm willing to give you for this product."

They, of course, have the right to let me walk away. They can block me, if they'd like, and put such things in their terms of service. But, the fact is, they engaged in this first. The advertisers created this arms race, a race for the most tasteless, obnoxious, privacy-invading, and intrusive ads they could design. I am merely implementing my own disarmament plan and imposing it on them, whether they like it or not (they don't, obviously...but, again, I don't care; advertisers have destroyed any sympathy I may have had for them).

As I mentioned, I took years to install an ad blocker. I am willing to negotiate, but I gave them an inch and they took a mile. They didn't respect "do not track", they took steps to insure that I would be interrupted, even if I wasn't even looking at the tab where they're spewing their garbage with auto-starting audio ads (this was my personal tipping point, I had four or five of them happen in one day of browsing and decided "Never again.").

Advertisers did this to themselves. They have no one to blame but themselves. I don't know what comes next, but I've opted out of their system, and I'll continue to do so as long as the technology is used in the most nefarious ways possible.
The Spelunky AI Competition
Is C++ OO? If you say yes, defend your position, given that Alan Kay disagrees.
Oh come on. The issues that are constantly being dredged out by NyT and Wpost, tend predominantly to be endemic to North India. Why ? Because the governance in North India has historically been in a much worse state and consequently its economic situation is much worse than that of the South.

The public schools in India are in a pathetic state, they can't get a degree from a university in their own mother tongues. In the rare case that they do, they never get a job...

This suggests that poverty brings many social problems. It also suggests that governance is a big part of the problem.

Colonialism should also be assigned a big part of the blame, since such egregious an aberration does leave a very deep scar on the society.

Indeed Angus Madison notes how India's GDP fell from 25% of World's GDP to ~1-2% in less than 2 centuries of British rule. The scorched-earth policies which economically destroyed foundries to textiles, which prevented mechanization, which destroyed widespread schooling & killed off scholarly traditions, which left many of the Jati's economically weakened, which killed of millions in famines...

The irony is that the fears of Luddites came true in India & China (with military help of course).

You have a very shallow understanding of societies (and arguably of history too). This goes back to my comment about class war - the anglicized urbanites have no tangible connection or understanding of "Bharata", the poor disenfranchised India.
> As a publicly traded company they are required to be concerned with shareholder value.

The directors of a publicly traded company are obliged to do the shareholders bidding. First, the shareholders can tell the directors to value arbitrary things, profit is just the default. Second, Google's two founders still have the majority of voting rights. So they are the shareholders directors care about.
Userspace RCU algorithms are experimental, quite brittle, and/or have little in common with RCU. They're certainly not usable as a production-ready scalable synchronization solution.
I link to quite a few microkernel-based examples in the recent post below. Skip to my reply to @Thoth with all the links.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/05/friday_squid_...
Until we can write truly robust versions of everyday productivity applications, such as editors or spreadsheets, without resorting to <canvas> underlayment, it simply isn't true that the web is in a good state. Flexbox improves the layout situation (as present CSS is astonishingly terrible at simple layout), but it won't elevate to anywhere near the point of making aforementioned productivity applications.
Yes, but the majority of shareholders votes are for these things. (Because Larry and Sergey control the majority of votes.)
That's just mediocre cursive. Any fourth grader should be able to do that.
C because [1], but Javascript is also being used in that space, Lua is small and beautiful, Python is everywhere, Forth can be implemented in 42 bytes of Forth...

[1] "Pointers are real. They’re what the hardware understands. Somebody has to deal with them. You can’t just place a LISP book on top of an x86 chip and hope that the hardware learns about lambda calculus by osmosis."
Yeah, that makes sense. The way it works out for me, even a year with astronomical healthcare costs is only going to cost me a couple thousand more because of the HDHP, and I saved nearly $8k last year due to the extremely low premiums, even after considering the out-of-pocket healthcare costs for my whole family. The way I look at it, that $8k has already paid for 2-3 hypothetical worst-case years sometime in the future.
Yes, Singapore probably couldn't exist without its poor guest workers. One of my in-laws is a long-time truck driver there for construction companies, and he and his colleagues live in makeshift shanties on construction sites, making 450 USD per month while working 12 hours a day.
This is true. It's also why most serious projects are paravirtualizing OS's such as NetBSD or Linux. QNX and Minix 3 leverage code from NetBSD. Most of the L4's do a L4 Linux that runs Linux in user-mode on the tiny kernel. I link to specific examples in another comment here. Even the CHERI secure processor project ported FreeBSD (CheriBSD) to it for the need to keep legacy software.

That's a serious issue that's killed a number of past projects. At least many modern ones learned the lesson and are acting accordingly.
They've been actively censoring stories about Pao for months. This is nothing new.
Thanks for the link. I always enjoy reading Appel's work.
Living is easy with eyes closed.
So I don't really agree with your opinion, but I don't think you're entirely wrong.

I've been doing scrum for about a year, and while I think agile is excellent because of the feedback look, I also think scrum is the worst agile method.
Mainly because non-technical management will turn it from managing software implementation, into managing employees. But it's worse because you have to tell everyone your progress, and god forbid you actually have a problem and fuck up that sprints velocity. I was almost fired once because my velocity was half of what it normally was one sprint, due to basically dropping development work and doing devops for a week.

I've been on a project where we had marketers join our sprints, and we're even assigned stories.
Timeboxing genuinely difficult problems into two weeks is extremely stressful, and most product owners don't care about complexity, only results.
I've had to make some super nasty hacks just to help get a "win" to make a client happy.
True scrum is just too rigid for applications with complex problems, which is why you'll have a hard time finding two places that do scrum the same way, or keep processes consistent sprint after sprint.
In my opinion, I find kanban to be a much more effective way in managing development, as it allows your engineers to actually solve problems. So I agree that agile is effective, but I don't think scrum is always the answer.

Sorry about the word vomit.
Fixed. Also such posts tend to get downvoted all the way down to hell, if that tells you anything.
Protective Rain Hat
There's a radical, yet likely very workable solution to this catch-22... A couple of years back when there was talk of introducing congestion pricing in Manhattan, there was a bridge toll increase around the same time. Someone figured out that if, instead of the usual $0.50 or $1 increase, the bridge tolls in NYC were increased to $20-25, then you could make all of the MTA lines (subway, LIRR, metro north) free of charge.

Of course, as you might expect, it never got anywhere...
Pressurized Abstractions
> HTML/JS/CSS as a compile target

That only works if your abstractions don't leak and your libraries are stable enough so that you can avoid having to debug on the lower level anyway.