skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Generally, non-hs trains go as fast as you would on the highway or a bit faster anyway. In the Netherlands our normal trains have a speed limit of 90 Mph I believe, but Wikipedia tells me that 80-120Mph is the normal range for intercitys. HS lines are often 180Mph+.
Sabayon Linux 15.06 “SteamBox” Installation Mode
The blowback hit them and they changed the response (and removed the original response)

>>>
UPDATED: Jun 3, 2015 at 1:45PM

While United did not operate the flight, Ms. Ahmad was our customer and we apologize to her for what occurred on the flight.

After investigating this matter, United has ensured that the flight attendant, a Shuttle America employee, will no longer serve United customers.

United does not tolerate behavior that is discriminatory – or that appears to be discriminatory - against our customers or employees.

All of United’s customer-facing employees undergo annual and recurrent customer service training, which includes lessons in cultural awareness. Customer-facing employees for Shuttle America also undergo cultural sensitivity training, and United will continue to work with all of our partners to deliver service that reflects United’s commitment to cultural awareness.
<<<
To the world really, because we do not have to drive to Frankfurt first to use a proper airport.

I look forward to the Frankfurt-London rail link operated by Deutsche Bahn. Strange times, when the UK thinks about moving away from the EU and staying alone on their little island like in the good old times and yet London is nearly as close to Frankfurt as Frankfurt is to Berlin.
Rail and sail tickets for Ireland to UK. Did it once. It was ok but I doubt I'd do it again.

Virgin trains are great. Liverpool to London in under 2.5hrs.
Some clear issues with long distance railway system:
- it costs TONS of money to built.
- you need to buy tons of land.
- to keep straight lines in a place like Europe, it often means you have to go through places where people live, and you need to have villages partly destroyed by it. Yay, democracy. You'll notice that high speed train systems are usually very much correlated with socialism (France and Japan are both well known socialistic countries - no surprise here at all).
- Above certain distances it makes no sense to take the train over the plane. I take the train in Japan every week for work between Kansai and Kantou, and it takes about 3 hours. A plane takes one hour, and it is 40% cheaper. Remind me why we need trains there?
- The maintenance of a railway is a huge ongoing cost.
- if there is one incident on the main railways, your subsequent trains are delayed or blocked. Yay for flexibility and "reliability".
- Try working in economy class in TGV in France. It's about as narrow as plane economy, and it sucks for working. In Japan the situation is much better but don't make a generalization there.
- green energy ? Oh, like in Japan where most of the electricity is produced by gas, petrol, imported at high costs from overseas since they have no such natural resources? Yay for efficiency! (truth is, Fukushima did not help, and electricity bills have been doubling since then (even home bills)).
- Anything that does not depend on railways can be upgraded, transformed, improved. We will have self driving cars at some point, and we will be stuck with high cost trains running on linear tracks forever, because there's no improvement to be made there. It's a 18th century concept pushed to the max.

There are cases for high speed trains, but even in Japan what they are doing is stretching it - nobody takes a train from north Japan to south Japan even if it's possible. It is just too expensive and takes too much time to be actually worth it.
The national highway system isn't making anyone any money, and we don't criticize it for costing upkeep and the billions it cost to build.

I'm of the opinion that good infrastructure should not be turning a profit. If it were profitable out of the gate you would just let private enterprise build it. The reason you get the state involved is because good infrastructure like high speed rail is a force multiplier on the effectiveness of everyone around it, even when it isn't turning a profit in and of itself (and usually you get the best societal value out of these things when they are a loss leader, and tickets are not prohibitively expensive...).

You want a high speed rail system in California so that hundreds of thousands or millions of workers could stop spending significantly more combined time and money on the much more inefficient road network when it comes to commuting. It would be a net positive in less need to maintain over-capacity highways, less car deaths, less anxiety and stress from the traffic conditions, and more workplace mobility along the rail lines.
Here's the difference though: We passed the Clean Water Act, and stuff got done. Before that, as far as I know, nothing really making illegal to pollute the waters. Of course there is corruption and the like in the US, but nothing like India. It's not like the problem was people defecating in the Cuyahoga, it was purely an industrial problem.
The problem with this kind of article is the author rarely considers/explains the context.

E.g. Managing a team of 10 developers at a company with 30% turnover is very different to managing a team of 3 developers at a company with 5% turnover. Approaches and techniques vary drastically based on context.
Why does this medievalbooks.nl keeps getting this much points for promoting one site that seemingly doesn't have anything to do with tech or news or anything related?

These are like weekly posts and all linger in the front page for some time.
That has to actually happen to be true. The OP's point is that it doesn't actually result in more people taking rail.
And right there's why this is relevant to HN: I think we just found a niche market that needs to be catered to, folks [1].

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinky_Boots_(film)
David Attenborough calls on ordinary people to help save Africa's elephants
> Japan (another country with great trains)

In Japan here. Trains in Japan (especially Shinkansen) are extremely expensive. Even for trips like Osaka to Tokyo the plane is much much cheaper (we are talking about 40%-50% cheaper). And lines take dozens of years to be paid in full before they generate money. It's just debt that is likely never going to be paid again (another very japanese concept).
My point was that even in the US, fixing an environmental disaster (and a small one at that) took a while. It didn't happen overnight.
It's strange to me, this arbitrary decision to lift yourself a few more inches from the ground by basically wearing little stilts on your shoes.
I'm going to take a stab in the dark and say your parent is probably on the short side, maybe 5'5"-5'6" or so, which might be an unspoken reason.

I could be wrong, but if your parent is already 6'2" the heels put him at 6'7"...
As a developer, and the most importantly, as a user of this website, I see no reason why my 1 point was taken off.
We all know that kind of feeling when we can call a taxi within just a few touches with Uber, or Share all of the great moments with Instagram. This is why we are pulling all nighters just to develop a free website that doesn't seem like it is gonna make us millionaires in a few months.
Please go ahead and try one of these websites here and let me know if I said anything wrong in my comment about this Omniflow. And please remember to give the 1 point back to the developers of this great website.
Thank you.
This seems to basically be the argument for preferring compile-to-js languages over vanilla javascript, even though by definition any advantages in the former have to exist in the latter.

Yet if I were to call coffeescript an overly complex javascript framework, people would probably strenuously disagree. But that is what it amounts to.
> It's not entirely clear what happens when a spaceship goes outside our observable bubble due to issues with conservation of information (similar to how it's not entirely clear what happens when you drop a spaceship in a black hole).

Crap. Okay, I'll keep that in mind.

> Then the question of whether that spaceship still exists is not a sensible question in physics, because there is no experiment that can confirm or deny it.

We could say it's not a sensible question in science (no experimental difference), but I think this is still a very important ethical question: I would still care about whether the colonists live or die.

Long term, this could be a very practical question: how should we expand? Must we stay within reach, or can we safely go as far away as possible? At this point, I don't really care if it's a metaphysical question. From the look of it, there's a definite answer, and one which will influence expansion policy a great deal.

Though to be fair, the point is kinda moot until we have a theory of everything.
This selling point also causes many of the issues Microsoft and Windows is known for. With choice comes compatibility issues with often leads to crashes and blue screens.

Apple can ensure the latest version of their OS and Apps work on all their supported machines and hardware configurations. This sort of testing and assurance is nearly impossible for Microsoft
Power outage. It is back up.
> and we don't criticize it for costing upkeep and the billions it cost to build.

Why shouldn't we criticize it ? Ever read Bastiat ? The money you spend somewhere is money you don't spend somewhere else. Wouldn't that be better to spend those billions in better schools, better hospitals, better metros, etc ? The choices you made have long ramifications in time and billions do not come cheap.
Unsubscribing from Newsletters
It is amazing how things have improved. I recall my dad working in the projects in Bushwick, and not getting home until late because there was a running gun battle going on outside. Many of buildings around there were boarded up or burned.

Another time, my dad and I were bringing some stuff to an elderly family friend somewhere around Greenpoint or Williamsburg. We stopped at some store on the way back to make a phone call, was gone no more than 5-7 minutes and "poof", wheels were gone from the car.
When was the last time you bought a plane ticket from the train ticket desk in the train station?
I've just searched what are now 58 comments for the phrase "prisoner's dilemma" and got zero hits. WHAT!

Higher Education is now a prisoner's dilemma, and that's really the point of the tulip article, even if he didn't use the phrase. Rational actors will want their children to have a college education and then higher degrees, even though everyone choosing that makes society worse off, not better off. Classic prisoner's dilemma. (Also a "Tragedy of the Commons", I would argue.)

Perhaps the most profound argument against our present system of higher education is that despite his philosophy degree (and I'm guessing at least 70 or 80 other degrees amongst the commentators) neither the author nor anyone else has said the two words "prisoner's dilemma." It's a simple concept, taught in every University, most undergraduates supposedly know what it is, and yet nobody can manage to recognize a gargantuan real world example! (I have yet to see the term PD applied to this subject in other media, either.) Time to scrap them crenellated white towers.
Well, height. I don't wear stilettos, but plenty of studies have shown height is both correlated to perceived power and actual power.
> -increased reliability (there are no train-jams)

Exactly, and let's not forget the ongoing strikes in France, very common among SNCF employees (who are akin to civil servants and go on strike at least a dozen times a year). If you job depends on it, you are screwed.
> HN is stereotypically seen as very left wing on social issues and libertarian economically.

So in a word, libertarian.
I personally know a number of people who are going to be spending the next $BIGNUM years in jail fighting a list of made up charges.

A lot of the rest of occupy (at least in some areas) met some nasty strong-arm tactics. In Oakland, it is hard to get any protest at all going now without cops (without uniform) showing up to smash ATMs[1] and similar attempts to discredit the protest with false flag tactics.

Occupy was a wild success for one reason above all: the protesters successfully shifted the public debate into the proper class-warfare discussion they should have been having 20 years earlier. Unfortunately, when you land a successful hit on your enemy, they tend to fight back. So it's true that a lot of people probably don't remember Occupy; attention spans are distressingly short, of course, and there are several reasons for that, but the alrgest - and most important - reason you don't hear much about Occupy these days is thanks to the modern equivalent of COINTELPRO. The Church Committee never really finished shutting that program down, and just like "Total Information Awareness", it is clear some programs were rebranded and shoved into neighboring departments.

[1] to name just one example: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Undercover-cops-outed-...
But if you are comparing to highways in the US then surely a fair comparison would socialise some of the capital and maintenance costs of the infrastructure. Even so 30-40 year payback on the whole lot is not that bad. SNCF is probably in debt because commuter rail is heavily subsidised, something that is necessary to do to keep cities flowing.
But, your analogy is flawed; the situations are incomparable.

You're not forced to use Rails for your server application, many other software exists as well as Rails: Django, PHP, etc. However you /are/ forced to use Javascript, CSS and the DOM; Unless you're a Big Browser Vendor and can try and coerce support (and even so, the amount of websites made in something like Dash is pitiful afaik). People made frameworks and libraries that make it bearable (SCSS, JQuery, etc), but that doesn't mean everything is solved...
It's no more or less arbitrary than going to work with a silk noose around your neck.
Joking about how html6 should be p,a,li,h,span only I googled it. And some people are pretty serious about a massive future version http://www.html6.io/
New model, two-year-old processor: The 2015 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro reviewed
In Britain, you pay a lot for peak-time travel, or last-minute travel.

London to Cardiff and back is £218 at peak times(!) on a fully-flexible ticket, £74 with a flexible off-peak ticket, and as low as £40-ish (which you paid) if booked well in advance for particular trains.

It would have cost about £50 in petrol (return) to drive, plus £40/day for a small rental car.
Ask HN: Friend refuses to pay for website
Normally I never ever do this but this was a friend I knew and trusted so I agreed to help his business setup their commerce website.

When I asked today when he would pay me he replied soon. When I pressed again he started to get angry and threatened that if I take him to court he has lawyer buddies.

I'm amused how night and day someone can be when it comes to money.

I wasn't even thinking of legal option. I don't know what to do. What would you do?
The problem with trains in the US is the incompetence of institutions running them.

Acela, for example, was supposed to be a high-speed service, enabled by a tilting mechanism to counter turning forces. But the mechanism is frequently unusable, because the train's tracks are too narrow. It cannot tilt without risk of hitting another train, or a telephone pole. [1] While advertised at 150 mph, it only briefly reaches that speed. Its shorter travel time is mostly a function of being an express. [2]

This was knowable well before Amtrak spent billions on the project, but wasn't realized until after they had. The Acela cars are nice, but their expense was driven by a feature they largely don't use. The whole project is a waste of capital.

What's really needed for high-speed rail between Washington and NY would be straight track. This could be found by going north of DC to Pennsylvania, and then in -- but this would take Baltimore and Philadelphia off the route. A similar route could be found for NY to Boston, but this would abandon Providence. Does anyone think Congress will allow that?

It might also be found by clearing a new right of way by eminent domain. This would already be hugely expensive. And it too would be fraught by politics, as local communities vied to have the route curved to serve them. And can you imagine the corruption possibilities -- to move the route, to gain knowledge of where the route would go for land speculation?

And the construction of the route, and the train equipment, would become opportunities for Congress to take care of their various union and corporate partners, all at tremendous cost, and at risk of the technical requirements of the service.

The US lacks really good rail because it lacks really good civil institutions to build and maintain it. The problem isn't money -- look at the billions that went into Acela -- it is the lack of the competence and focus to actually serve the public interest.

[1] http://articles.courant.com/2000-05-27/news/0005270037_1_til...

[2] http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0110.carr.htm...

See also:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/24/us/acela-built-to-be-rails...

EDIT:

It turns out that Amtrak looked at all this in 2010: http://www.amtrak.com/ccurl/214/393/A-Vision-for-High-Speed-...

Look at the routes they analyze (p. 9 and 11). Rather than look to straighten track, they bend the NY-Boston route to catch such vital places as Westchester Airport, Danbury and Hartford. The DC - NY route turns to catch Baltimore, Wilmington, Philadelphia and Trenton. The economic case studies talk about the benefits of high-speed rail for Hartford and Baltimore. We can only guess at the cost increases and service impairments associated with routing to those cities.

The point of this isn't to get people from DC - NY - Boston faster. It is to get the promise of that service -- which people do want -- to justify enormous spending serving the interests and vanities of incumbent players.
Indeed. One nitpick though: you can't get around pausing the thread briefly or else waiting for it to hit an interrupt, because there's no way to observe another CPU core's registers without its cooperation.
> It's not that many people are "okay with it" but that they don't truly understand what's going on.

Also it says that people who know feel powerless to do anything about it. What choice do they have, other than live in a cave?
I don't think they had to work that hard. Cigarettes check a lot of boxes - oral fixation, the way the smoke moves, the whole concept of a style accessory(1)... it has panache that alcohol certainly can't match.

(I don't know the proper name for it, but the idea of one object as part of your person that draws attention, kind of like how a good photograph needs a focal point that naturally draws the eyes)
It is not clear the format. Paper, epub, mobi??
I finished something like this too, after working on it for about a year: http://papertogether.com/ Of course it's not as fully featured, but it was a fun experience. I'm surprised to see that so many others had this idea and implemented it too - I thought I was the only one interested in collaborative drawing.
I think it's fair to say that taking any single company and holding it as evidence of what the private sector produces is flawed, but Comcast is a particularly flawed example. Likewise with any single government entity.
What are some uses people are thinking of after reading the README?

Here are some of mine:

* Encrypted live communication (video, voip, IM) via a web browser

* Could something like this be added to the SSL/TLS security in HTTP?
For those considering whether to read it, it's a powerful statement on consumer acceptance of privacy trade-offs:

Key findings on American consumers include that -

- 91% disagree (77% of them strongly) that "If companies give me a discount, it is a fair exchange for them to collect information about me without my knowing"

- 71% disagree (53% of them strongly) that "It’s fair for an online or physical store to monitor what I’m doing online when I’m there, in exchange for letting me use the store’s wireless internet, or Wi-Fi, without charge."

- 55% disagree (38% of them strongly) that "It’s okay if a store where I shop uses information it has about me to create a picture of me that improves the services they provide for me."

The authors go on to note that "only about 4% agree or agree strongly" with all three of the above propositions. And even with a broader definition of "a belief in tradeoffs" they found just a fifth (21%) were comfortably accepting of the idea.
Mayor Duggan takes on Detroit's neighborhood housing
Can't stop laughing... this guy synthesizes pure comedy gold with a touch of absurdity and a lot of cynicism.
Your claims didn't match my recollection, so I just looked up a one-way fare from Tokyo to Osaka (6/25/2015; date randomly chosen) on the train, and on Kayak. The first train I found (not necessarily the cheapest) was $117 USD, vs. a cheapest airfare that was $55-$140 via the deep-discount airlines and $200+ for the less crappy ones. So yes, if you're willing to fly the discount airlines, you can save about $60.

That said, flying takes 1h30, plus an hour on each end, give or take, and then you have to get to the city. The train takes 170 minutes (~3 hours), doesn't require security, and drops you right in the center of town. That seems pretty competitive to me -- which is probably why most trains I've taken in Japan have been at least half full, and popular routes sell out on a regular basis.

I won't dispute that Japan has spent a great deal on their train system. The US has easily spent hundreds of billions on the highway system. It's a matter of priorities.
Schengen is irrelevant here, British people have the same rights as every other EU citizen (i.e. go, then register as a citizen which is just a formality).

But the person asking is American, which is presumably very different.
Cherry-pick. There are a lot of good ideas. I found some of the sorting of tasks really useful. There are people who can sort, and people who can't. Give me ten things and I'll find 10! different ways to classify them. Other people seem to "just know" what makes the most sense. I found the classification scheme in GTD extremely actionable and simple. Most of the rest wasn't so useful to me.
Maybe it's just me, but I'm quite leery of using the services of a company that doesn't have a physical address, let alone a phone number, listed on its website. Those two things are dirt cheap nowadays - mailing addresses and phone numbers. Call me paranoid, but I don't trust things like that. Just my two cents.
FWIW I listen to the audio book every year and each time I learn something new. For me the author's concepts of the natural planning system, cranking widgets and rapid inbox parsing have been key to my work and personal life for many years.
Quite simply, because they are very interesting to a significant subset of the community here. Of course, that's the reason why anything gets points around here.

The reason many of us find this interesting, I think, is that people who love learning are wont to be fascinated by the history of learning.
Why would you turn women away for not wearing heels? I never understood the appeal of them. I'm actually very attracted to women who wear skirts with sneakers.
This would be great as a obfsproxy plugin if I understand it correctly
> Coming from a former colonial possession (Ireland),

It's really not historically responsible to equate British rule of Ireland with colonialism as it existed in India.

> but in many cases the only reason the external power was able to take over was due to dysfunction in the colonized country that limited its ability to respond to externally-imposed challenges.

This is also not a particularly accurate depiction of the way that colonial powers built their empires. It's not a particularly accurate depiction of the way that the British took control over India either.