skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
False. China has high-speed trains that travel around 1000 km. China is also big. Really big. Also pretty poor. But it manages despite its ridiculous dictatorship to get a modicum of useful stuff done. Stuff that the US--uniquely in the democratic, developed, world--is unable to do.

For more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_China

So the claim that "trains don't scale well in the USA" is false. Trains scale just fine to thousands of kilometres. The distance from Bejing to Hong Kong, which has a rail line capable of more than 300 kph (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rail_map_of_China.svg) is just shy of 2000 km as the crow flies, which is more than the distance from NYC to Chicago and a bit less than the distance from NYC to Dallas.

And pointing out that LA is more distant from NYC than that is utterly, completely and totally irrelevant. The distance from NYC to LA has absolutely nothing to do with the inability of Americans to build a high speed rail link between various Eastern and Southern cities, and there is zero plausibility to any claim that NYC and Chicago (or Dallas) aren't commerical hubs of comparable importance to the US as Bejing and Hong Kong are to China.

So we can put that false claim to bed now, and never muddy the discussion with it again.

The more plausible reason is the other one you cite, at least by implication: the American economic and political system, uniquely amongst developed democracies, is unable to muster sufficient collective resources in the form of public or private investment to enable creators to build a fairly straightforward rail network that would serve American economic needs.

The US is not "the most technologically advanced coutry in the world". It is two countries, one of which is technologically advanced, the other of which is backward in almost every respect (and kept that way by policies set by the first.)

Until Americans figure out how to deal with their unique social and political deficits and inabilities they will continue to suffer under stub-standard conditions in almost every respect. They will continue to die earlier, live with higher crime rates, lousy railways, and dramatically lower economic efficiency than that enjoyed by citizens of almost any other advanced nation.

Canada also sucks with respect to passenger rail, and we are generally far better than Americans at solving our collective problems, so there may be more to it than that, but clearly size alone is not the issue, or China wouldn't have the amazing high speed rail network it does.
Fantastic work, this is an amazing project. I think myself and every other Cs / electrical eng student has dreamed of this at one time or another. It's a gigantic undertaking though and it's exciting to see it done.

The implications for teaching are great too. Having this physical reference would really cut the learning curve in computer architecture.
More than the love of cars, I think one other important factor is that US cities have been built and developed around car-first traffic for the last 80? years.

Which makes it much more optimal to drive around.

Now if you consider the economical ecosystem that was built around the road traffic, it's no suprise that the train network is having a hard time growing up.
I don't know anything about whether the butter and eggs caused your wife not to get sick (though I'm skeptical)... but I'm pretty sure it's not what made your girl beautiful :D
Sigh - the continued slide into awful "journalism" at the graniud continues.
I know someone has to give all the "new media" graduates a job, but, at least supervise the output!
I've had lots of jobs over my career and none of them involved "Mechanical transformation from requirements into a code".
Land Size:

Germany | 137,847 mi^2 (square miles)
United States | 3,719,000 mi^2 (square miles)

Paved Roads:

Germany | 400,784 mi
United States | 2,674,830 miles

Not sure that's a fair comparison.

[1] https://www.cia.gov/Library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
Was he helping with NASA as well?

http://www.globalresearch.ca/operation-nazification-u-s-mili...
> because if something hits the windscreen, its going to shatter.

Not according to this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e87HIlOIYFA
looks like it has some bugs with the fajr time
Startup time in a server is a non-issue... Those processes keep running the whole time.
I think population density is a factor. China and the US have the same area, but China has 4x the population. Consider also England and Japan, densely populated islands with great train service.
> So you think scripting languages that have no type constraints will somehow advance to the point of being the same as writing native code?

Absolutely. It's just a matter of time. Javascript JITters and LuaJIT are pretty good examples already. And there's so much more that can be done!

> maybe you know only scripting and dynamic languages and you want to believe that at some point a solution will come to you instead you having to learn programming at a lower level?

I do C/C++ (20+ years of experience). And a lot of other languages. Firmware and kernel driver development. 6502 (almost 30 years ago), 68k, x86 (+SSE/AVX/etc.), ARM (+NEON/etc)...

Sufficiently low level?

> I've seen the latter attitude in plenty of people.

There's a difference between where the buck is at right now and where it's going.
Yeah, and memory is infinite, and all disks are free, and the computing fairies make all the processors super fast.
But back in the real world, startup time is a valid concern.
First year – Venture Builder
Australian senate passes controversial anti-piracy, website-blocking laws
What programmers really do
Yes, the US is big, but a large part of its population is heavily concentrated. Trans-continental high-speed trains would be a waste, but better connections on very densely populated areas would be a great idea.

And the difference is not really that stark as you make it sound. Europe can be big too. While only 8 US states have a higher population density than France, there are 35 US states with a higher population density than Sweden.

https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=List_of_U.S._states_by_popul...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...
The homer Simpson car?
This is the best advice given based on my experience.

I am also suffering from low confidence and inferiority complex. What actually helps is coding more and pushing to github as much as I can. Especially if I think it is still not good enough. This makes you inclined to work more at it. So gradually you get better with time.

Another thing which I could associate with is pair programming which just juggles my process. There are at least 6 things that I am thinking then the guy next to me says that is should be done this or that way, and I already lost what I thought. And you need to rebuild your entire modeling over and over and over again. Its demoralizing and energy consuming way overboard.
So long story short people are different and the entire point of pair programming is talking about the problem and getting better with problem-solving by communicating.

I quote one of my latest interview where the guy said "just don't sweat over it there is no best answer". Which he was trying to say that the only thing they were interested in that I could use "lego" to build and reason about my building or not.

And I could give more and more advice. But it's okay if you feel that way, Proves that you care . And there are some quotes about being human and all.
Nuclear energy from waste
The population is far from evenly distributed across that larger area.
Reading this has only further convinced me that Haskell is unsuitable for production due to the difficulties laziness posses to correctly reasoning about the performance characteristics of code. Idris is not only strict by default, but has an even more advanced type system, and because of that it will probably overtake Haskell eventually.
Lockheed, actually. :-)
Yes, same test, but this video doesn't demonstrate how far the tire and wheel went after it deflected off of the full canopy.
While i'm not sure whether legalization or the Swedish approach works best(criminalization of purchase), but if we want to prevent trafficking, maybe it's possible to use some sort of lie detector(standard, fmri, P300), etc - and ask girls whether they work for themselves, or are forced , or trafficked - and only let girls who work for themselves work in legal brothels ?

It won't be perfect, but maybe it can reduce trafficking ?

EDIT: please down just downvote, explain what's wrong with my line of reasoning ?
Microsoft Azure Gives SDN a Hardware Assist
http://blog.ndk.io/2014/02/11/jvm-slow-startup.html

40ms sounds okay for me, even for most command line tools. Oh and I most probably don't get a segmentation fault ;-)
When coming from windows world, I quickly learned that ctrl+s can be undone with ctrl+q. And that's all, never went into more detail. Wrote it off as a quirky stuff linux has plenty of.
For me it reminds me of the LCL in anime series Evangelion. I have seen it pop up a few times in modern sci-fi.
Everybody has the answers, nobody does the actual math in terms of costs, or the testing in terms of safety.

F1's biggest problems right now are A) costs, and B) the number of people pissing on F1 without the slightest knowledge of or affinity with the sport.

Also, F1 cars look just fine right now. They just look too similar, but no one has been able to solve that problem without escalating costs.
Guys, as an european, i despise a bit US approach you-cannot-get-anywhere-without-a-car (seriously, looking back at my stay in LA and Hollywood 10 years ago, many places didn't even have pedestrian access! Or if they had, approach time was 2-3x more compared to dangerous walking along the road... that's just plain wrong).

That said... trains are expensive. No, EXPENSIVE. Swiss have probably best rail system in the world, with train stations being central point of most towns and villages. Buses are just complementary where putting up rail track would be ridiculous (hardcore mountain areas, desolate places with very few people living). But Suisse is small, and wealthy. Not sure about actual cash flow government -> SBB (rail company), but tickets are expensive like hell. Cost wise even for single person road costs same (albeit sometimes it's faster by car, depends), when more people come, car is much cheaper (and convenient). Never been to japan, so no clue how well known Shinkanzen are integrated with more local transport.

Thanx to freaking unions for steady high prices, but not only them. When moving between densely populated areas, trains compete with planes, not cars (and planes are sometimes much cheaper, sometimes faster, sometimes not). If in future we'll get trains moving steadily over 500 km/h, that would be a proper time saving advantage over longer distances. Airports became such a time and energy drain, with ridiculous and annoying security measures that most probably doesn't work anyway, just hikes the price and takes time.

Let's not forget fragility of rail network, any delay/accident can have massive cascading effect that stretches far across network, much more compared to cars and planes (well, here it's more complicated for those with connecting flights)
> It kind of irritates me that Yanis throws this out like he has no responsibility for making up this "miniscule" difference. If the difference really is "miniscule," why isn't it covered in Greece's proposals?

And why are those proposals, like eliminating Greece's very early retirement, only being made now? Greece's average retirement age is purportedly 61, with some people retiring as early as 50. Meanwhile Germany and Spain raised their retirement age to 67 and have discussed 69. It's completely understandable to me that their taxpayers who will work until 67 do not wish to fund these pensions.

It tells me something that Yanis suggests fixing the pension system now in this 11th hour proposal. If Greece was seriously committed to fiscal responsibility, the government would have done this of their own accord long ago, right? By including this as part of the "deal", presumably it will allow the Greek government to say it was "forced" on them, rather than taking responsibility and making a sovereign decision, independent from any new agreements with third parties, to do the right thing and institute policy that will allow their government and pension system to be solvent.
Mending the developer/player relationship with Threes free-to-play
Don't know your "real" world. In my real world, the AWS instance takes several minutes to come up - I can spare some milliseconds on thr JVM startup.
Interesting to compare these very different problems with another country with a dysfunctional rail system, the UK.

Here, privatisation has led to massive cost inefficiencies and logistical nightmares caused by trains and track being operated by independent organisations. It also gives us the more insidious long-term issue that there is no longer a railway working culture, where someone could start as a footplateman and ascend to upper management in the warm embrace of a single national rail company, bringing their invaluable working experience up with them. Nowadays the people at senior levels are more likely to have moved sideways from Sainsbury's and will know sod-all about how to run a railway.
Decorators in Ruby
I have also heard that human trafficking increases after legalisation. This makes sense to me since other relatively unpleasant jobs are also done by illegal immigrants in many countries.

My remaining question is how we draw the line between voluntary illegal immigration and human trafficking for this class of work. I'd guess from my perspective even the voluntary immigration would seem beyond harrowing and carries risk of abuse and death along the way, so it would be easy to paint all of it as bad, yet clearly many think this is the best chance for them and their families.
Pronunciation and etymology: https://twitter.com/asciinema/status/612898969073635328
Yea but a designer thinks they look cool and hasn't researched these things so we must push forward... thanks Wired...

Jokes aside, I do find articles like this quite vexing, they take a glance at an area that has a huge amount of depth, form an opinion with little research, and push it forward like it has authority from specialists in the field asking "why are not moving forward?"... even, when there are loads of interesting discussion points as to why we are where we are, that has actual consequence and real discussion that get even more ignored as sensationalised items take president.

Not to be a _total_ buzzkill about some fancy looking pictures of new F1 cars that could interest some people :`P
>Dear Europeans and East Asians: to paraphrase Douglas Adams, America is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to an American.

I've drove coast-to-coast like 10 times. It's bit but not that big when you compare it to East Asia (except if you mean "Japan" by that). The Trans-Siberian railway is 5,500 miles -- for comparison Chicago to LA is less than half that.

Heck, Ukraine to Portugal is the same distance as coast to coast US.

[EDIT] Let's put it this way: both China AND Russia, each by itself, is like 30% larger than the US.
IFMIS+System+hacked+How+Over+Kshs+800M=+Fake+Contracts+Almost+Approved
I don't know. Have you heard of Marc Ribot, for one?
Yea also China's population is way more packed onto one side of the country than the US is.
Docker is vendor lock-in technology

This I do not understand. For me, one of Docker's selling points is easily being able to deploy/move containers, even to my own hardware (if I am running the daemon).
In countries where prostitution is accepted and legal, it's safer for both the sex workers and the customers, with less risk of disease and abuse.

Do you know any good studies that back this up. While I certainly want to believe it and it does fit nicely with my own general political/economic narrative of the world, I've yet to find any conclusive evidence for it.
Is it really cutting out a middleman?

My girlfriend showed me an internet cleaner service I wasn't interested, as I view that as a middleman taking their cut, and cleaners are already pretty poorly paid. I would rather go on word of mouth recommendation / or an add in the local shop noticeboard, as I did before this sort of service sprung up.

I view Uber or Airbnb as a monopolized version of the middleman.
> Why did it buy four new submarines?

Because it was/is forced too. Geopolitically speaking it's very convenient (and maybe reasonable) to act as if every state is a "sovereign state", but it's not[0]. The submarine (along with a long series of obscure deals involving bribery, etc.) were strongly supported (almost imposed) by Germans as a bargain.

> It also seems like there's a lot of corruption and irresponsible financial policy.

That's true. There's no beating around the bush, since 1990 spending has been reckless. Basically the EUR gave a free-card access to credit.

The entire pension system should be re-structured but at the same time the base salary should be brought up and not down. Young people can not find jobs and they absolutely can not sustain families.

The current system is extremely twisted: Usually the elderly of the family receive (well used to receive, before the crisis) boosted pensions with which they support the younger members of the family who are unemployed or underpaid. The fact that the young population has "access" to elderly's money is the only reason you don't see riots around though.

The problem is that the reforms already made, slashed a huge chunk of the household's income while not giving anything back (not even hope!) in return. That's why in the end of the day, the majority which suffered from this cuts, is not likely to accept any more reforms.

According to the "Financial Times": "main pensions have been slashed 44 to 48 percent since 2010, reducing the average pension to 700 euros a month … About 45 percent of Greek pensioners receive less than 665 euros monthly — below the official poverty threshold."

> All of these facts together give the impression that Greece isn't committed to doing the right thing.

The problem (for Greeks) is that every single reform imposed by the Troika (or institutions or whatever) are always for the worse and never for the better. After 7 years of implementing reforms dictated from the Troika, I think we can rest assured that they're reform schedule was a failure which drove the public upwards incredibly AND creating a humanitarian crisis.

Greece needs a "New Deal"[1] or a "Marshal Plan". But there's no Roosevelt or G. Marshall around, unfortunately. Again, you're taking for granted that the Troika wanted to "help" Greece, but that's far and away from the feeling I have looking at the facts at hand. They'd rather "discuss" with the parties that made all the mistakes you say, instead of a new non-so-corrupted party.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal

[0] http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/06/15/germany-is-bluffing-o...
Making the Perfect App Icon That Creates User Engagement
It's not uniquely illegal (at least in Germany). It's illegal for the same reason forging any document (for fraudulent purposes -- i.e. in 99% of all cases) is illegal: it misrepresents an authoritative claim.

It's not entirely unlike having a friend show up in a fake police uniform to vouch for you.

There are edge cases like art or educational purposes, but using a fake ID to prove your identity to a third party is definitely fraudulent: you're saying "this authority attests that this is my identity" when the authority in question does nothing of the sort and the document claiming it does is forged.
wow ! in an almost same vein: http://www.homebrewcpu.com, doesn't use discrete-transistors, but starts with 7400 series ttl chips. 'slightly' easier :)

edit: and this is with complete s/w "stack" as well, including ansi-c compiler, multi-user port of minix-2, tcp/ip stack...
My kid was an ipad expert by that age. 4-finger swiping and everything. At 2 he now knows his mom's unlock code and can punch it in. As long as a child has a healthy mix of real world and outdoors, I'm convinced that tablets and phones are amazing brain stimulation for children.
4 things you can learn from your users searches
Mattogno's Opus Magnum on Cremation Furnaces Finally Available
This could be huge for small bands and artists. Yesterday at a show in Berlin the drummer kept talking about the bands Facebook page and handing out paper with the link. If a band could just have a becon that sent out push notifications to the fb app it could increase engagement significantly.
I'm impressed with their focus on privacy, but for me as a business owner I am probably not as interested in my customers privacy as my customers are in their own, so the privacy issue should probably be communicated more to fb users than to businesses.

Secondly, this page is very vague about what benefit I as a business owner will gain from service. Seriously, what will I gain?

I remember Facebook announced a free WiFi service for businesses, where I as a business owner could give my customers free WiFi if they checked-in at my location on Facebook. Now there's a benefit for the business!
"Designed for privacy"

Let me guess, instead of broadcasting a textual description of the location and a Facebook URL that's visited if you click the interaction button, the beacon contains a URL that's automatically downloaded from Facebook every time you enter the location (presumably to download "up to date and accurate information").

Couldn't find any details on the page though, anyone know?
What makes me very uncomfortable is that are enough men that not only not care about, but actually enjoy rape to make it a huge market.

This is not something that happens "between two consenting adults". If you read the article you'll see that there is no way in hell that they don't know what they are participating in. In fact many seek out the worst treated girls.

There looks to me that there are more than one type of prostitution and maybe going after a particular type of John is very reasonable.
This. Haven't been drunk since 1998. Haven't had a night out since 2006 and we came home after two hours because we were bored. Haven't missed it either. I'd rather be with them and my wife.

I'm the first person up in the morning and the last to bed and I wouldn't swap it for anything.
They're licensing the music. Whether they make any revenue or not doesn't matter.

You can't hand out other people's stuff for free and then refuse to pay anything because you didn't make any money from it. And I'm saying that as someone who thinks the current copyright system is incredibly broken.
I find it insane that coffee shops in NL still have to source their weed from the black market.
F1 is cool because the cars are open and you can see the driver. If you want closed cockpit racing, choose a different class, le mans is closed cockpit and really cool.

F1 has got pretty boring, and the drivers think it could be better. I hope they simplify the back wings so racing can get closer... at the moment most of the overtakes are done under DRS, so driver skill isn't so much of a factor in race position.
Sorry, but I just can't take this book seriously.

The author uses this incredibly annoying marketing copy associated with get rich quick schemes. It comes across as manipulative and patronizing.
He even sells optional pro and master packages with the book.
Interstellar seemed to suggest use of a similar method when the astronauts were in hibernation.
This is about the first time that I see "UK" and "great train service" together in one sentence ;)
This looks incredible. They've taken the fact that people will scroll through their Facebook feeds when sitting at a cafe or shopping at a retail store and monetized it! Also, if they were to integrate push notifications for every time you walked into a store to inform people of your specials that could work great.