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Berlin bans Uber app citing passenger safety To all who think passenger safety equals insurance: you are wrong. Passenger safety is much more.Passenger safety is mainly 3 topics, which are all have to be fulfilled: 1. The car has to be in proper technical conditions. 2. The driver is trained to be allowed to drive people around for business purposes. Higher standards apply, then for regular driving behavior. 3. Insurance, insurance of the passenger as well as insurance of third party. As for commercial drivers, they do much more millage and as such it is much more likely, that something happens.For (1): a commercially driven vehicle makes much more millage, as such it is required to visit inspection every year, while for regular vehicle in Germany it is only every other year.For (2): drivers with a commercial license to drive people around are required to have regular medical check-ups. Also wrong behaving while driving is judged much hard, mostly twice the amount and double the points. That means, they can easily loose their license. That way, there should be a commercial pressure on them to drive safely.By the way, Uber does not compete only with Taxi service. Their drivers don't need a taxi license at all. Because, in Germany there are besides of Taxi additional licenses for such business. The are a number of such services, that operate within legal bounds since tens of years. The only difference between the "cool" start-up Uber is, that those have no shiny App and you have to know there phone numbers. That said, there are also services, which have an App, like http://www.mydriver.de/fahrdienst/berlinThe main problem besides safety is also, that Uber promotes and supports moonlighting/illegal work. Because their argument is, that they provide only ride sharing. BUT, if that whould be true, then why promote a new ride sharing service called UberPool? If Uber would provide real ride sharing, as they argue, then they would only start UberPool and not UberX and UberPop.But with UberPool there is the problem for them, they will compete with lots of other ride sharing companies, which operate in Germany since years and which are well established, like Blablacar, Flinc and others.TL/DR: If Uber would operate within the well established business practices and requirements, nobody would complain. But they don't want, because they want to be cheap on the back of actively ignoring all requirements.
Berlin bans Uber app citing passenger safety I have to wonder about this quote:> As a new entrant we're bringing much-needed competition to a market that hasn't changed in years.What does a San Francisco startup knows about the taxi situation in Berlin? Uber has often been well received in cities where taxi service is inefficient, but are berliners really unhappy with the service? Does Uber know that taxis in Berlin are used mostly by tourists, and therefore are not that hard to catch?Maybe Uber has spent a lot of time researching the German market, or maybe they are following Walmart steps[1] in applying US notions to a foreign market. But after living in Berlin for a year, I have to wonder: if Uber's free-for-all approach clashes against Germany's love for paperwork, whose fault is it?[1] http://www.dw.de/worlds-biggest-retailer-wal-mart-closes-up-...
Berlin bans Uber app citing passenger safety From what I read in other articles (e.g. http://www.golem.de/news/fahrdienst-app-uber-macht-in-berlin...), Uber insures the drivers, but with a lower maximum payout for damages of 3.5 million. The mandatory minimum for car liability insurance is 7.5 million for damages against persons in Germany.
Berlin bans Uber app citing passenger safety The bigger picture here is the trend of local governments desperately pushing against a tide of ever more pervasive globalisation.The simple reason something like Uber will win is business travellers expect to show up in any city and for it to work. If it doesn't that's not a mark against the Uber-like, it's a mark against the city. People do not want one app per city or country, but one which works everywhere. This is beyond the scope of any government to get near.The thing is Uber are slimy in the way Napster were taking the piss a bit, but it's clear the space is there for someone to come in and clean up.
Dear jetBlue... So they are asking for JetBlue to give them special treatment? They booked 43 flights in 30 days. How about cutting their flights in half so that they are less likely to miss one?I wonder what their backgrounds are that would make them good resource to interview JetBlue passengers and make them deserving of special treatment from JetBlue.
Dear jetBlue... I sense that 50% of the posters to this thread are missing context.Please read: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=759577Before suggesting that the article is not appropriate for HN. The Idea of traveling to all these cities was first discussed on HN.And to all the naysayers - These guys are going to do something more interesting than I've ever done. I don't know what adventures and enterprises and entrepreneurial ventures you've rolled out over the last few years - but they must be impressive if 30dayflight doesn't appear to be HN fare to you...
Dear jetBlue... Not only is this chick completely irresponsible, but this "trip" is a joke. He's going to be living in an airport for a month, all for what? No one cares about people who live in airports, nor do they care about the fascinating lives of airplane passengers.I genuinely hope his trip goes as planned, but this social networking media web 2.0 garbage is a waste of the internet.
Dear jetBlue... first question, how does someone make a living risking "millions of dollars" and barely have enough money to afford a single flight?
My Recent Experience with PayPal Customer Service. Try PayPal's Merchant Technical Support (https://ppmts.custhelp.com/app/ask - Mass Pay is under "API Products") The developer forums on x.com can sometimes be helpful as well. They have a few staff members that work the boards.If you're a developer, you don't really want to use their front line Customer Service.It also helps to have an account manager but how you get one is a mystery. They called us up one day and said, Hi! I'm your new account manager.
My Recent Experience with PayPal Customer Service. Either their staff are lying to their customers in an obvious manner (not a good idea) or their internal documentation lies to their ignorant staff (not a good idea).Either way around this is pretty much a perfect example of awful customer service.
My Recent Experience with PayPal Customer Service. I get worried the more I read about PayPal recently. I have had no immediate problems with PayPal before but I am worried it's more a matter of "When" I get issues and not "If".This whole conversation is very worrying in particular, can they really be that stupid and un-interested?
My Recent Experience with PayPal Customer Service. PayPal is run by imbeciles. I was once scammed on eBay by a buyer who received my item, then returned a broken identical one, notifying PayPal that I scammed him. Without even looking at my sales record or waiting for my response, they took the money out of my account and closed the issue.After a month and a half of fighting on the phone with people who can't comprehend basic logic, getting an affidavit notarized, AND submitting photo evidence of the switch: I was only awarded 80% of the original amount.The buyer was allowed to continue using eBay and PayPal to scam people, and I got negative feedback.From this experience and the countless others posted to blogs every day, it's astonishing people still use the service.Boycott PayPal!
Lisphp is a Lisp dialect written in PHP. Happy to see PHP be taken more seriously around here. Trust me, we're not all moronic programmers using register globals, magic quotes, and other abominations originally available in PHP.This is a pretty cool project.
Lisphp is a Lisp dialect written in PHP. I'm the author of this, I made the web REPL also.http://dahlia.ruree.net/try-lisphp/Well, of course, it uses a sandbox environment.
Lisphp is a Lisp dialect written in PHP. This is analagous to McDonalds serving duck confit (and it actually tasting kind of good).
Lisphp is a Lisp dialect written in PHP. Minor nitpick, the cdr implementation is (out of need, as far as I can see) terribly slow for larger datasets, it uses array_slice($this->getArrayCopy(), 1) .
Apple Updates Safari In terms of the supported Web Platform APIs, is this new Safari release any different from the recent WebKit snapshots? (http://nightly.webkit.org/builds/trunk/mac/1)Also, is WebKit2 framework still private on OSX 10.9?
Apple Updates Safari Google Chrome Team: "Ah snap, and we just dropped WebKit!"Edit: It's a joke, guys. :/
Apple Updates Safari I actually downgraded back to v5 because of the terrible changes they made to Web Inspector in v6, so I'm pretty annoyed that they didn't even mention it when introducing the new version -- at a developers' conference, no less!
Apple Updates Safari Now with PRISM support! j/k
Ask HN: Unlocked Nexus S and T-mobile Buying unlocked will save you money over two years because T-Mobile will give you a discounted monthly rate. I do it this way.Also, if you are considering a variety of T-Mobile phones, then you can buy them and return them within 15 or 30 days. For example in the past season I've bought the Samsung Galaxy S, the Google G2, the HTC MyTouch 4G, and will buy the Nexus S.FWIW, T-Mobile has been great for me. The network is significantly better than ATT in San Francisco. Also, the customer service people are head and shoulders above the other wireless providers. They have taught me how to tether in Linux, how to root a phone, and were especially helpful diagnosing a GPS chip issue with me.
Ask HN: Unlocked Nexus S and T-mobile I don't know anything about the Nexus, but T-Mobile's service has been great for me on the East Coast. I switched from Verizon about a year ago and with prepaid service spend well under half what I used to. I can also make calls from inside the house again, something I couldn't do with Verizon (except if I stood on one leg in a corner).It also saves time because it's one less monthly financial transaction to monitor--I just buy a bunch of minutes every few months or so. I recommend it for anybody looking to reduce costs and complexity (start-uppers, for example).
Ask HN: Unlocked Nexus S and T-mobile Never had a problem with T-Mobile service, and I've been midwest, southwest, and east coast. Haven't been to Georgia. I'm thinking about that phone too, but some of the features missing from Galaxy S (microSD slot) give me second thoughts.
Ask HN: Unlocked Nexus S and T-mobile The only purpose for you buying it unlocked is not being locked into a contract.
How I Deal with Sexual Discrimination in a Positive Way? It's hard to take this blog post at face value. My experience with the industry has been that IT people are terrified of offending women and go far out of their way to avoid being perceived as sexist. I do know a couple guys that flirt with women at work but that's a far cry from sexual discrimination.As long as we're sharing anecdotes:* My girlfriend of 3 years also works in this industry, and she has never complained about an incident of any kind.* I worked with a female developer who was fired and complained about discrimination. But this was not the case, she was fired because she was terrible at her job.* I also worked with a gay developer who was fired. He complained loudly of homosexual discrimination... but I saw his check-ins (or lack thereof)--he was also terrible at his job.So the two major cases of discrimination I personally know about in Silicon Valley have both been frauds. Is discrimination real in Silicon Valley? Certainly, yes, there's always a few bad apples in any large community. Is the problem being blown out of proportion here? I think so.
How I Deal with Sexual Discrimination in a Positive Way? I think this post is mistitled. Sexual discrimination is about unequal opportunities -- passing over women for promotion, asking inappropriate questions in job interviews, etc.The OP is describing something more like a crime. Extortion.
How I Deal with Sexual Discrimination in a Positive Way? Okay, I'm going to reach far now: Sorry, but this is blogspam. You have to ask yourself: What is the purpose of this post here? What exactly do you want to achieve by posting it here? The answer is clear, this is posted here solely for generating publicity. Now let's dig again: Why do you want publicity for this? If there is a real issue here, take it up with someone who is actually responsible for fixing it. If you want to publicly shame people, then keep posting it on sites like HN.99% of all the people visiting this site won't ever concern this issue, and as surprising as it is to myself, I'm actually a little offended by your insinuation that I should care about this. But that's not the actual problem I have with your post. The real issue is that this kind of topic has been discussed a million times, and therefore has no place on HN.
How I Deal with Sexual Discrimination in a Positive Way? A few days ago I ate at the Sales/HR cafeteria instead of the engineer cafeteria. A table of HR people I didn't know that was 80% female invited me to join them for lunch, and eagerly chatted me up for the next half hour.This was a really illuminating experience that highlighted for me what an impact the male/female ratio can have. Getting that level of female friendliness/attention at work is totally foreign to me (I don't work directly with many women), and was kind of nice.I think there is a vicious cycle where women in technology get too much attention from female-deprived men, which conditions them to have a guardedness about them, which conditions the men to feel even more female-deprived (and leads some of them to be creepy). It's unfortunate.I'm not sure if this has anything to do with a conference organizer who demands sex (it certainly doesn't excuse it, even a little). But I do think there are a lot of lonely guys in tech.
Recursive Postgres Queries I've implemented similar designs in the past, but found ltree[1] to be much more useful/expressive when it comes to needing to fetch, order and manage lists of hierarchical data.[1] http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/ltree.html
Recursive Postgres Queries I've dealt with recursive queries many many times. For legacy production systems I stick to Oracle's CONNECT BY statement and half joins to keep performance okay. Most of the tables I deal with typically have 80 million rows with a fanout of 1:2.5 and a average depth of ~3.A better solution is to create a temporary table to insert results in as you go if you can't afford extra DB results and perform additional inserts to that table in order to effectively take advantage of shared memory on the server side. The second better result is to effectively flatten out the rows as a closure table.
Recursive Postgres Queries I don't know Ruby, but does Benchmark.ms clear buffers and flush cache? If no, the second query has a large advantage, sometimes you can get similar performance improvements without changing query...
Recursive Postgres Queries This is absurd. Is all this just to eliminate the n+1 queries problem? There are already solutions for this in any ORM.When loading a survey into an ActiveRecord object, why not just preload the associations? You can then iterate through the children and subchildren of survey in Ruby. Either Survey.includes(categories: { subcategories: questions }).find(1) (one query) or Survey.preload(categories: { subcategories: questions }).find(1) (four queries) would do the trick.No need for convoluted Postgres-only queries.
The worst visualization I've ever seen (CNBC on the oil spill) I think the progression is interesting.It starts by visualising what 1 gallon equals using something that people recognise in everyday life ... then shows a lot of 'wow, it really is vast' slides, then moves to 'well, it's pretty small compared to the size of the gulf / how much oil we have in reserve'.It's not a good example of info-graphics - it's a slide-show with illustrations.
The worst visualization I've ever seen (CNBC on the oil spill) And it uses Flash for static images. Can't they get anything right?
The worst visualization I've ever seen (CNBC on the oil spill) This shows you exactly what not to do with your info-viz. They show about 100 milk jugs of gray gradient and say, imagine if there were 184 million of them?Whoa Whoa Whoa. HOLD THE BOAT. You (CNBC) are telling me that the oil spill is 184 million gallons is also equivalent to 184 MILLION ONE-GALLON MILK JUGS?!?!? That is just crazy - consider my mind BLOWN! Perhaps you could show a pyramid of 184 million gallon jugs and put a small outline of a 6' tall man next to it?Then there is this one: http://www.cnbc.com/id/38294088/?slide=7 At least there is some useful information on this slide "674K Homes for one year". But why the hell show a picture of the entire electrical grid? It doesn't make any sense.The rest of them are pretty bad as well, they either don't show scale, or they show a very misleading scale.
The worst visualization I've ever seen (CNBC on the oil spill) On The Bugle (a genuinely funny podcast) they were amused by these ridiculous types of comparisons, so they calculated how far cricket bats made of frozen oil would stretch, placed end-to-end.
How our small startup survived the Amazon EC2 cloud-pocalypse This "cloud-pocalypse" simultaneously affected multiple availability zones in US-East. Had you had the misfortune to have your multi-AZ pair in two affected zones you would have had significant downtime. The only architectures that were truly safe from this outage were those with a completely multi-region strategy, and I suspect those are very far and few between.
How our small startup survived the Amazon EC2 cloud-pocalypse I am still waiting for Amazon's post-mortem, which I hope is honest. All the other services (4sq, Quora, etc) seriously were all in the same AZ and made the mistake of spreading their infrastructure to multiple AZs?Amazon has seemed rather dishonest about the true breadth of the outage.
How our small startup survived the Amazon EC2 cloud-pocalypse FYI: us-east-1a for you might be us-east-1c for me. The labels of the AZ doesn't mean anything outside of your account.
How our small startup survived the Amazon EC2 cloud-pocalypse that jargon has legs: "cloud-pocalypse"
Lessons Learned for Getting Better Results from Developers This is an excellent list, and I would love to work with someone who ascribes to it. I also find it a very depressing list, because almost all of those items involve an awful lot of effort. It's really hard to imagine many people even half-way living up to it. It ends up making me think of the times I've done projects for people who have done just about everything the author is cautioning against.
Lessons Learned for Getting Better Results from Developers I manage a team of 6 software engineers, and while I like most of this list, I think #3 will only work for a small team and small-medium projects.If I took most of the burden on to myself to do the work my engineers don't like I would be a major bottleneck.Alternatively, what I like to do, is couch and encourage my engineers through these less savory tasks so they can get to the development as quickly as possible.Edit: You could also argue that it might be worthwhile hiring a business analyst, but I haven't had much good experience with BAs.
Lessons Learned for Getting Better Results from Developers "designers speak human and developers speak computer."I hate this generalization because it can be used as a blanket dismissal of a developer's opinion.
Lessons Learned for Getting Better Results from Developers Pretty good list but I think the author contradicts the notion and importance of iteration. No design doc and no code base is free from changes and improvements, particularly in startups. If you can't deal with changes, you probably should go work for an enterprise company where you spend half your time blowing hot air across the table. You can't just write once and leave it be, the problem with design mockups and wireframes is that they don't really encapsulate the element of interactivity, and certainly lack customer feedback.I also think designers and developers are very much alike even though we often bang heads. It's a creative process to write code, and I think a lot of people outside the circle don't appreciate how mentally draining "creation" really is.
Heroku founder Adam Wiggins: The Legacy of the Self-Made Man (2008) Well I'm glad the last 100 years of business history can be summed up with a single strawman. It's such a relief that there was no nuance or complexity in history, now I won't have to do any of that nasty "thinking".Sarcasm aside, you present an entirely simplistic view of history perfectly tailored to the point you're trying to make. The only people who are going to believe anything you're saying are the people who already agree with you, because people tend to be less than critical when it comes to their pet theories.As a counter-point, here are some of those grey-suited company-men from the post-Teddy Roosevelt era:Henry FordAlfred SloanThomas WatsonWalt DisneyWill KelloggWarren BuffettWilliam BoeingGordon MooreHenry KaiserThere are more. So what exactly is your point? There were clearly self-made men after Roosevelt. Are you arguing that there were more self-made men before Roosevelt? I'd like to see some evidence to that. Or maybe you're arguing that the general "sentiment" was against self-made men. Again, I'd like to see evidence of that, and good luck finding it. First you'll have to define just what the national "sentiment" is, then find scientific studies of people both before and after Roosevelt that tried to discern it.
Heroku founder Adam Wiggins: The Legacy of the Self-Made Man (2008) > America became the first large-scale experiment of a society that could be called a meritocracyBit of a fail here. The word meritocracy comes from a book of the same title written in 1958 by Michael Young (interesting fella, wrote the UK Labour Party's manifesto in 1945, founded the Open University).The point about meritocracy is that it is a satirical term. (The beauty of it being that in any society the wealthy and powerful can claim they rose on merit. In the time of the Divine Right Of Kings, merit was being chosen by God.)But don't take my word for it, read Michael Young on the subject in 2001.http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2001/jun/29/comment
Heroku founder Adam Wiggins: The Legacy of the Self-Made Man (2008) Prior to the industrial revolution, status in most societies was based on one thing only: heredity. No matter how much you accomplished - or didn’t - you stayed in the same station of life.Ye, this isn't really true. Lets take, for example, 18th century Naval officers from the UK:* Captain Cook - discovered Australia, mapped the Pacific etc. Father was a farmer* Horatio Nelson - Defeated the French, considered greatest Naval commander of all time. Father was a minister* Arthur Philip - Commander during American Revolution, lead colonization of Australia. Father was a teacher.It is a very common misconception that in old society it was impossible to move from the lower classes into the upper classes. The British Empire, the prototypical aristocracy, was largely shaped and developed by people who were raised in the lower classes. This is because the military, navy, their universities (eg. Isaac Newton), and many other parts of government and private societies were strict meritocracies.The upper classes actually produced a very small number of notable people, outside of royalty (Charles Darwin, Churchill, Brunel (although his grandfather was a French farmer)(Edit: "America became the first large-scale experiment of a society that could be called a meritocracy." - Citation needed. See above.)
Heroku founder Adam Wiggins: The Legacy of the Self-Made Man (2008) As I tend to point out any time someone goes on a masturbatory flight of fancy like this: there ain't no such thing as a "self-made man". There are only people who are too short-sighted or too narcissistic to acknowledge the others who helped them get to where they are.
Ask HN: We're building a real-life, location-based MMORPG. Will you play? Thanks, but I'm already playing a real-life location-based MMORPG which takes up most of (or rather, all) my time.
Ask HN: We're building a real-life, location-based MMORPG. Will you play? We build a mystical, medieval universe atop these real places.Please, not another one. Although it is the most popular trope, and thus probably has the greatest potential market, that also makes it difficult to differentiate your product. There are lots of alternatives - secret societies, Cthulhu mythos, robots/AI, or some Diamond Age type fusion of several genres.Browser playable is good, but if you have location based checkins I think the mobile app (or rather, mobile version of the browser page since you're text-oriented) should certainly be available from the beginning so people have access to it when they're bored or with friends. It doesn't have to be be exhaustively capable.
Ask HN: We're building a real-life, location-based MMORPG. Will you play? In the university I studied, students organized different games played trough the year. It is a good method to help people socialize and know each other in the first year.One of these game was called hitman. Every student who wanted to play had to provide a picture of himself and was registered as player. Then each player was given a random photo of another player and a small trumpet in paper that rolls out when we blow in it. So evry player was a hitman and a target of another hitman at the same time.The hitman had to "kill" the person on the photo that was given to him. Killing was done by blowing the trumpet and touching the person with the rolled out paper.Of course it was forbidden to kill anybody during lessons. The task was made more difficult by allowing someone to be immune to killing by holding an open umbrella above his head.The hitman had thus to first locate its target, spy him without beeing recognized as his hitman and find the best moment to kill the target. Witnesses must be present to attest a valid killing. The last target to survive was the winner.I didn't play the game so I don't know the details, but it was very funny to see these students walking around with open umbrellas, even inside buildings, and all the trumpet noise. It was also funny people talking to each other trying to figure out who is ones hitman. There was enough players to make it very hard to know, even at the end of the gameThis is an exemple of game that was socialy usefull and fun. Organizing, providing the equipment and managing the game could be a business. Sell it in a box, one box per player. The umbrellas might be a bit dangerous for the eyes, so funny big umbrellas without metal in it, just for the game use, could be better and even more fun as well as justify the rent fee.
Ask HN: We're building a real-life, location-based MMORPG. Will you play? I'll play for sure.I've been tossing the idea of a game layered on top of reality around quite a bit. The pitch is "imagine a group of WOW players exploring a real cave in Yosemite National Park and fighting against a real invisible dragon for loot.". The world is great, there is no reason to invent another one.In more abstract (and less crowd-pleasing) terms, I believe that such a game can give a motivation for changing people's behavior (for better or worse). If I have a boring commute to work on foot, then I can just go on a "quest" to work, which will be reflected in my profile. The quest could even be charitable. Maybe there will even be an API for quest-givers, who know ;)The real fun begins when you include group dynamics. Imagine getting a quest to capture the dangerous thief kind of Alcatraz, but unfortunately he is so obese that you need at least four people to carry him away. Would you ask strangers to join you on your quest? ;)Check out this great related TED talk by the guy who runs SCVNGR: http://www.ted.com/talks/seth_priebatsch_the_game_layer_on_t...I think thee idea is a little ahead of the curve, but in a few years (call me crazy!) something like this has the potential to be the defining game of a generation.Keep us posted on your progress.P.S.: I second the "no fantasy" sentiment. Fairies and dragons don't work for everyone.
The key to good UI design is not simplicity And yet, Tumblr is better than Posterous.I know this is subjective, but my point is: maybe the use of email in Posterous appeals to you, but it never appealed to me.
The key to good UI design is not simplicity Agreed and well stated. However, since, the concept of "familiarity" will continue to change, how will modern UI designers understand what their end-users know, relative to what they should know? In order for the design to evolve, people must often be led. I whole-heatedly agree with you that simplicity is a relative term, but truly finding the nexus of your users' understanding vs. what they need to know is difficult.
The key to good UI design is not simplicity The offer.They suffered through email? The necessity.The success/failure of your simplified (not simplistic) UI rests on, I'd say, the true value of the offer it is presenting to the user.I'm separating learning curve from usable-"ness"
The key to good UI design is not simplicity Also the money they spend on their website (may be they dont need to spend that much) does not allow them to work with people who are good at whet they are doing .
Ask HN: Any Talented Writers Here? Love this idea. Would definitely love to fund some of my fav authors, esp ones that post on free sites in spare time. I am wondering how this would work though. As a reader I'd totally do it for an author/excerpt I was psyched about.As an author I'm wondering how useful it would really be. After all, if you already have a large following, getting a publishing deal would be pretty easy. And if you don't have a large following, then you're getting little to no money through the site. Is the site designed to actually help you gather an audience, or is it expected that people will divert their existing audience from other means (social media, etc)I'm assuming if I give money I'd get the book for free (at least digital version). And how much would I have to give to get this. Would I get anything else? Like maybe a "funders-only epilogue" or something?
Ask HN: Any Talented Writers Here? Have you spent any time at places like http://www.fanfiction.net/ ?My wife is always saying that there are many authors on there that ought to focus on getting non-derivative work published (if they aren't already).I imagine authors could use pseudonyms for their fundraising?
Ask HN: Any Talented Writers Here? This is a really nice idea (and one, as a part-time writer with a very unfinished novel, I have been thinking about). My worry is that it would be hard to raise the ~$50,000 many authors would need to be able to be able to give up work and complete the tome.
Ask HN: Any Talented Writers Here? clickable: http://www.storyfunded.com
LastPass Disclosure Shows Why We Can't Have Nice Things This is to be expected when you have ignorant people reporting on things that they are not willing to educate themselves about. Anyone who wrote sensational garbage about the LastPass event didn't bother to understand how LastPass works and what the real potential of any breach could be.Frankly, it leaves me exhausted in the same way the regular stream of sensational ignorant responses to violent video games, boobs in video games, or explicit lyrics in music leave me exhausted. It's extremely difficult to fight an ignorant public being exploited by a willfully ignorant and sensationalistic media.The likes of Tech Crunch et al who should be in a position to counter such mainstream media reactions and behavior are all too often, unfortunately, jumping right into the fray and showing that they can be just as counter-productive as any big old-media outlets.
LastPass Disclosure Shows Why We Can't Have Nice Things This is the only sane post I've read about this incident. All the major tech sites blew it way out of proportion. LastPass did everything right, and yet every headline was along the lines of "LastPass has been hacked, panic!".They deserve better, especially seeing as how transparent they were about the whole situation and how they handled it.
LastPass Disclosure Shows Why We Can't Have Nice Things This reminds me of the recent story of an Applebee's (an American chain restaurant) employee that accidentally served alcohol to a toddler. All the commentary I read on the story said that the employee should be fired. But as long as it was an honest mistake, that's a terrible idea. No employee will ever be as careful with drinks as that guy will now. You shouldn't ask for experience when looking for employees and then fire them for getting it.You have to be careful though because sometimes a mistake like that is not an honest mistake, but carelessness. To bring it back to the topic at hand, LastPass (possibly) made an honest mistake somewhere. Sony is careless. Fire Sony, run to LastPass because now they will be even more paranoid.
LastPass Disclosure Shows Why We Can't Have Nice Things Wait a second. I mean it's nice and all that LastPass was being overly cautious. But how reassuring is it that they noticed an anomaly but weren't able to figure out what it was?And this is a serious question, as I'm no expert in the field, but it seemed strange to me that they couldn't explain what actually happened with any certainty.
Barriers to scala adoption I liked the comments about immutability in the article, even from an OOP standpoint. After having read the "Eiffel" book 20 years ago, and being exposed to programming by contract and class invariants, the whole java-bean concept made me want to vomit. "Here's an object" -- too bad it's not good for anything yet, but eventually it will be! (good luck). Beans have to be almost the #1 anti-pattern in Java.
Barriers to scala adoption > Another language I don't see mentioned above is Fantom. Some say that already is a simpler language that offers improvements over Java without the overwhelming power of Scala, but it hasn't been widely adopted. There are many theories for this, my own is that it maybe doesn't offer enough new stuff for someone to make the effort to switch. Scala clearly does add a lot of value, so that should be a lesson for newcomers. Offer enough new stuff for people to be interested.I'm glad he at least mentioned Fantom. I haven't done much other than play around with it, but it seems like a much prettier "better" Java than a lot of the other contenders. I've never understood why it hasn't "caught on." Maybe he's right, maybe it just isn't different enough to be compelling.
Barriers to scala adoption I like Scala, though I just dabble in it. But I have a few thoughts on why it will be difficult for it to be mainstream.One of its greatest features require a meaningful rethink of the JEE stack. Actors passing messages seems to not really work in a one thread to one request world where you should fork new threads.There are too many ways to do the same thing in it. Manipulating maps or list can be done with various features of the collection library. This becomes the Java version of Perl. Some developers will use $_, some prefer variables and they each prefer their own ways. It can make it hard for one developer to pick up where the other left off.Finally, the documentation seems to be more complicated than necessary. The Scala version of JavaDoc available on their site is almost a difficult to navigate as MSDN. From here we go to the books about Scala. These take careful reading to glean even the most basic structures (took me a while to figure out that the primary constructor is all of the lines between the {} of a class that isn't encapsulated by a method declaration).
Barriers to scala adoption I don't use Scala but I appreciate the fresh ideas it has brought to the Java /JVM ecosystem. Think Jetlang Actors modeled after Scala actors or Functional Java library etc. or even Google Guava ,which although has nothing to do with Scala but promotes a succinct programming style.Keep up the good work !
Skip Class Am I the only one who really enjoyed going to class ?This kind of post pop up once in a while here, some guy tells the experience about skipping classes or dropping out of school. If that works for you, great! But I am actually one of those guys that could happily get back to school if I could afford it.School gave me so many things: My wife, my first job, my first client, etc. I could connect my dots back and everything started from the three different occasions I had been enrolled in three different universities. Should you skip class and doing it great? Sure! But your mileage may vary.
Skip Class Again, different people learn (and enjoy learning) in different ways. Not sure why the title of this post is the directive "skip class" and not "I skipped some classes and did some other stuff and still made elementary mistakes at my start-up, so that worked out."
Skip Class Rather than go to class I created a popular custom discussion forum for students to help each other with the homework problems (back in the early 2000's). Ended up teaching myself perl, html, css, javascript and sql in the process which landed me my first job. Never had to do my physics homework (useless busywork) because the answers were posted on the forum. Still received grades of B+ or higher.
Skip Class When people say "I need a job in X, to learn Y, before starting Z," do you think they actually mean it?I understand that sometimes it's necessary. But most of the time, I think people ask use this excuse to take the less risky path.
BBC announces the closure of the Digital Media Initiative I was working at the BBC at the time this was first suggested (on web stuff, not video) and saw the edges of this project. From the start it felt like the start of a good idea, but with a huge remit and no focus.The idea of being able to edit video locally using a low quality version of the file, seems like a good one. All the rendering is done on high end servers working at full capacity with no wasted machines. Users can edit from their desktop without having to use a high end machine too. Until you talk to anyone who works in video - how can they be sure the video is lit, focused and presented correctly without viewing the source file. And the process of uploading files, waiting for edit versions and downloading the final files, even over a decent connection added huge overhead.Felt like there wasn't enough discussion with the actual teams that would use this.But as I say, I was not involved nor did it affect me and my team directly so I could be way off in my very small view of the project.
BBC announces the closure of the Digital Media Initiative I'd be interested to know what technology platform was being used. Around the time this project was being commissioned, the UK govt and the BBC were VERY close to Microsoft.As part of the NHS's connecting for health project, a huge amount of money was spent on MS licenses and associated infrastructure.Time to make public these contracts with Siemens and see what's what. Like that's going to happen...
BBC announces the closure of the Digital Media Initiative £100m? That just isn't OK, I wonder who will be losing their job.
BBC announces the closure of the Digital Media Initiative I just assumed all major broadcasters were digital now...does this mean they are still recording and editing in analog?
Graphs Show How Reddit Got Huge by Going Mainstream Original post with HD graphics: http://www.randalolson.com/2013/03/12/retracing-the-evolutio...
Graphs Show How Reddit Got Huge by Going Mainstream Ugh, I really hate stacked area graphs. Usually you can display the same information in a much more readable format by using a multi-colored or dotted line graph with a legend, and use logarithmic scaling to space out all the crap on the bottom.The main problem with these stacked graphs is spikes/dips on the bottom cause everything stacked on top of it to distort in weird ways, making things very difficult to see.Also, the ones in this article are square shaped, so you can't even see total site growth over time, which would be interesting and relevant.
Graphs Show How Reddit Got Huge by Going Mainstream The decline of r/programming with regard to quality of links and discussions was probably inevitable.
Graphs Show How Reddit Got Huge by Going Mainstream Or an alternate headline could be "Graphs show how Reddit became more diversified as it became more popular".
Brain Hacks Top Founders Use to Get the Job Done Mine are that much better.1 - Don't sleep ! (what?!)1.1 - Reap any opportunity to close your eyes while thinking and listening to people, if they start closing by themselves you've lost the game.1.1.1 - Move your head not your eyes, the tiny eye muscle wont last 30 hours.1.1.1.1 - Rotate the whole body in stead of the neck, if it isn't in front of you it doesn't exist.1.1.2 - Never look in a direction you don't have to. HD streaming takes huge amounts of bandwidth and processor power, the more things move the harder you run out.1.2 - Use half open eyes when the opportunity presents it self.1.2 - Keep the body in the ut most relaxed position.1.2.1 - put the heating up as far as possible AND wear lots of cloths. Heating 70 kg of water takes huge energy. You need a temperature as if you are in bed. (People also make 50% more mistakes at 20 degrees Celsius than at 25.)1.3 - If the task doesn't require thinking (or very little) -> don't think! While seemingly impossible at first, after 20 hours or so it comes naturally.1.3.1 - Get someone to drive you or use public transport but don't look out the window.2 - no drugs2.1 - no alcohol2.2 - no tea2.3 - no tobacco2.4 - dont drink coffee, coffee is for people who sleep.3 - Eat fruit and vegetables 3.1 - Don't eat meat, all predators sleep after eating.4 - Be overly kind to people, the last thing you need is drama, drama consumes more energy than anything but also forces you to look, listen and think at the same time, all without getting any work done.5 - No sex 6 - Don't shave 7 - No personal hygiene (optional)8 - When you inevitably fail to stay awake sleep 14 hours.9 - Don't hurry with anything, drive as economical as possible, nothing can beat that.10 - Eventually, if you have no other data coming at you, the subconscious will learn what you are doing. Accidental naps feel like interruptions before you get here. If the subconscious understands the work the nap wont prevent you from thinking about the work.11 - Stay productive11.1 - If you start hallucinating go to sleep immediately regardless of the location.11.2 - If you get migraine you haven't been doing 2 and 3 long enough.12 - Remove all unnecessary sources of sound from the environment. The brain has no firewall, you don't want to be processing nonsense.13 - Oxygen is like steroids, get as many plants as you can.14 - Forget about all other goals, the only goal is the 168 hour work week at 62.4% productivity or~so.14.1 - The rewards isn't the money. It is sleeping with the thought yer've accomplished all that. No amount of money can buy that feeling.:-)It sounds like a big deal but it isn't anything like running a full marathon in the Arctic, wearing nothing but shorts.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wim_Hof#Featsomg hax!
Brain Hacks Top Founders Use to Get the Job Done New proposal: Death to "hacks."Unless you're Paul Graham, you don't get to say hacks.We're talking here {"lifehacks", "brain hacks", "social hacks", "parenting hacks", "HR hacks","travel hacks", "Business Insider Tip XYZ hacks"}All of this sounds an awful, awful, awful lot like SHORTCUT or TRICK.There's nothing wrong with being efficient with your time, diligent, and sneaking around useless grunt work w/ a bit of clever automation, but this lame-article hack movement is the worst.Dare I say I've heard enough from these hack writers?Death to hacks.
Brain Hacks Top Founders Use to Get the Job Done The title of this article seems to have been generated by an Upworthy-style bot targeted at Hacker News.
Brain Hacks Top Founders Use to Get the Job Done I read the whole article waiting for the thesis to become prescription drug abuse.
Trading Program Ran Amok, With No ‘Off’ Switch 'Prediction is difficult, especially with regard to the future'.It looks like they were using some new algorithm, which should have made them a lot of money, had the market gone up after their massive purchases. In that case, they would have pocketed fat bonuses and would not be on the news.However, it has not happened, so the crying and the search for a scapegoat is on. It sounds like the case of the banking business as usual: 'heads I win, tails you lose'.Ultimately, there is a really serious problem with the concept of limited personal liability for companies engaging in speculation. It is an assymetric arrangement, whereby the directors are entitled to the profits but are never personally responsible for the losses. With such rules of the game, it is advantageous to take crazy risks. Expect to see a lot more of this and many more taxpayer funded bailouts.
Trading Program Ran Amok, With No ‘Off’ Switch What I wonder, following this story this week, is how the software quality controls at a place like Knight compare with those for life-critical systems like those in, e.g., aviation.On one hand, you'd think the QA in finance would be pretty solid, considering that the survival of the company could be at stake (witness Knight). On the other hand, I have a feeling that even there, people just don't take it that seriously.Would love to hear from anyone with more experience writing software for these industries.
Trading Program Ran Amok, With No ‘Off’ Switch They lost $440 million (and amount greater than their market cap), and possibly the company, on what the world knows to be incompetence.At some point if I couldn’t stop it - I’d be tempted to just kill the power to the server rooms, all of them. There just has to be a way to cut your losses.
Trading Program Ran Amok, With No ‘Off’ Switch So, some of the owners were looking for a way out, and magically this thing broke loose and started giving away (basically) free money to undisclosed receipients. In the meantime all the technicians were fast asleep and couldnt kick the machines down or something, while they were losing milions of dollars per minute. This article is a completely honest recap by completely honest people, about completely honest traders/bankers (bankers are not people).Edit: on a COMPLETELY unrelated note, trading firms/banks are known to actively pursue the extraction of money from their clients with bogus trades/advice http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/opinion/why-i-am-leaving-g...
Playboy Interview: Steve Jobs (1985) I can't think of someone else right now who could come up with such an easy way to understand computers."Playboy: Maybe we should pause and get your definition of what a computer is. How do they work?Jobs: Computers are actually pretty simple. We’re sitting here on a bench in this café [for this part of the Interview]. Let’s assume that you understood only the most rudimentary of directions and you asked how to find the rest room. I would have to describe it to you in very specific and precise instructions. I might say, “Scoot sideways two meters off the bench. Stand erect. Lift left foot. Bend left knee until it is horizontal. Extend left foot and shift weight 300 centimeters forward…” and on and on. If you could interpret all those instructions 100 times faster than any other person in this café, you would appear to be a magician: You could run over and grab a milk shake and bring it back and set it on the table and snap your fingers, and I’d think you made the milk shake appear, because it was so fast relative to my perception. That’s exactly what a computer does. It takes these very, very simple-minded instructions—“Go fetch a number, add it to this number, put the result there, perceive if it’s greater than this other number”—but executes them at a rate of, let’s say, 1,000,000 per second. At 1,000,000 per second, the results appear to be magic.That’s a simple explanation, and the point is that people really don’t have to understand how computers work. Most people have no concept of how an automatic transmission works, yet they know how to drive a car. You don’t have to study physics to understand the laws of motion to drive a car. You don’t have to understand any of this stuff to use Macintosh—but you asked. [laughs]"
Playboy Interview: Steve Jobs (1985) > Jobs: my personal feeling is that we are going to enter sort of a computer Dark Ages for about 20 years. Once IBM gains control of a market sector, they almost always stop innovation. They prevent innovation from happening.I'm very glad that IBM and its compatible equivalents won the market, we would certainly be in much Darker Ages should Apple have won the desktop war, with their close-minded view on the world and its strict control on contents, peripherals and whatever gravitates around the Brand.
Playboy Interview: Steve Jobs (1985) Jobs, conceptually articulating what would become the Internet in 1985:"The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it into a nationwide communications network. We’re just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people—as remarkable as the telephone."
Playboy Interview: Steve Jobs (1985) Great read. Haven't finished it yet, but this answer was really perfect:"Jobs: Let me compare it with IBM. How come the Mac group produced Mac and the people at IBM produced the PCjr? We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build. When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through."
Out of Prohibition’s Reach: How Technology Cures Toxic Policy There is a good book whose title and author are eluding me for the moment that examines the necessity of a frontier for freedom. Freedom requires the ability to up and move into an area that is a challenge for the nearest power to control, regulate, and abuse. That is the only meaningful check on the power of the sedentary bandits that become a region's elite.Historically, this has all been geography. But going forward, there is the opportunity to do something new with technology and section off slices of economic activity into reaches that while existing in the same geographic location as a centralized state are prohibitively expensive to control for its bureaucrats and enforcers.The malaise of the modern world is, I think, in large part due to the shrinking of frontiers. There is little of the world left that is easily colonized but also hard for the major players to reach into, and so the states become ever more grasping. There is no safety valve by which people can up and peacefully revolt with their feet in large numbers, and that won't return until the cost of getting into orbit falls dramatically.Meanwhile, there is cryptography.
Out of Prohibition’s Reach: How Technology Cures Toxic Policy I must be missing the actual argument that supports the headline, "Out of Prohibition’s Reach: How Technology Cures Toxic Policy". If the claim is that governments cannot keep up with technology, I would hardly call that a cure. That's a workaround.
Out of Prohibition’s Reach: How Technology Cures Toxic Policy Pretentious undergrad writing + "cryptography" = heavy bro!!
Out of Prohibition’s Reach: How Technology Cures Toxic Policy See also: copyright law and BitTorrent.
Lime Text: Open Source Sublime Text clone I wish they wouldn't attach themselves to the sublime brand. It's not theirs, and it's pretty shady to ride another project's coattails when their intent is essentially to cannibalize it by being sublime-but-free. You can discuss the merits of open source and paying for tools all you want, but basically their goal is to put a man out of business who's made something that a lot of people love, because he has the gall to charge $60. Anyway. I'm all for competition, but do it under your own banner with your own ideas.Also, I think it's weird that the fact that it's made in Go is part of the pitch. I mean, unless I'm contributing... I don't care. You could write it in brainfuck if it does the job.
Lime Text: Open Source Sublime Text clone If there is one app I've always been thrilled to pay for, it's Sublime Text. I've purchased and renewed the licence ever since v1 came out. While it may not be open sourced, you can see it was created with a lot of love for code and openness. Today there are thousands of amazing plugins to enhance it. And though I fully respect the open source initiative, I, for once, am very happy to support / give some money to a peer developer who has made our world much better.
Lime Text: Open Source Sublime Text clone Great intentions, and huge shoes to fill. Already off on the right foot by going open source. Hope the authors have thick skin, this is one market that people are generally very particular about, and won't hold back on the details.For me UI is almost as important as the engine. I'm a very clean/minimalist/organized person and if the software (or text editor in this case) does not, or cannot reflect that then there will be issues.
Lime Text: Open Source Sublime Text clone I don't like how it shamelessly piggybacks on Sublime's reputation by using its name left and right and doesn't hesitate to knock it down by calling itself a "successor". This comes across as disrespectful at least.