skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is not believable because it is comparing oranges to apples. It is comparing the revenue of the SF taxi industry (not the dollars going through the drivers hands) to the dollars going through Uber for some area of unknown size around SF.

It is also unbelievable if you try to do the bottom up revenue numbers. Uber claims to have 11,000 drivers in SF [1], but most of them are part time. This implies a monthly revenue per driver of ~$3800 at the $500 million revenue number. Actual data from surveying SF Uber drivers working more than 41 hours a week showed they only generated revenue of $2971 a month [2]. The drivers working part time (20 − 25 hours a week) only generated revenue of $1376 a month. I can’t think of a way of making the top down and bottom up numbers agree.

Edit. I fixed the broken link [1].

1. http://archives.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/uber-releases-dr...

2. http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Lyft-Uber-drivers-tur...
I'm inclined to blame the author's negativity on his obvious conflict of interest.

At least, my understanding is that he recently began working for a group that competes with Bitcoin in trying to connect traditional banks and (non-Bitcoin) blockchain technology. He has an incentive to scare people away from Bitcoin.

Not saying there are no scaling/social/whatever issues in Bitcoin. But the author seems to be conflicted.

Disclaimer: I own a few Bitcoins, and thus hold the opposite conflict of interest.
That seems more relevant than it is. The US tax code used to be riddled with loopholes - nobody actually paid the top rates.
In the case of Tuft and Needle, it's basically risk-free. Buy it and if you don't like it in the first 100 days, they'll give you your money back and have a local charity pick up the mattress and donate it to someone who needs it. I believe Casper offers something similar. With an offer like that, there was really no downside to trying it out, especially at 1/2 the price you'd pay in a store.

As for a better product, I'd argue yes. It's very well made, and very comfortable.
Adblock Plus said its representatives were uninvited to the IAB’s annual meeting
Mike, can you imagine any way to run a cryptocurrency so that growth doesn't threaten decentralization?

Could a cryptocurrency not be controlled by those who can afford to spend the most in CPU power (like governments)?

Could consensus occur by human power?
I've written a blog post on that very subject. Turns out you can have a $0.03 item mailed to you, including shipping, from China!

http://romain.goyet.com/articles/free_shipping_from_china/
I'm curious if any of the police officers behind the seizures could be sued as personally liable when no charges are brought.
John Oliver had a great piece on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEpZWGgJks

In the US, where the constitution expressly prohibits it: that your property is seized w/o due process is complete and utter garbage.

By no means am I a right-wing/vigilante militia supporter, but this type of behavior from the police makes me support having a heavily armed citizenry.
I sure have. Take a look at Lake Tahoe's VRBO/homeaway listings. They're routinely cheaper on VRBO than airbnb for comparable properties, and it works fine.

People in tech just assume airbnb is better.
> This is extremely optimistic.

It's inevitable.

> We don't have AI that advanced

Correct.

> or evidence that AI will get that advanced any time soon.

That's incorrect. The trend is obvious, watson can already out diagnose a doctor. AI doesn't have to work like a human to out do a human just as planes don't have to flap their wings.

> What IS coming soon is automation of mindless, lower-level jobs.

That is coming, but as things like Watson show, it won't be limited to mindless lower level jobs. All but the more pure intellectual pursuits will gone in very short order. Most jobs, even white collar ones, don't take that much thinking.

> It's going to be a long time before engineers, for instance, are replaced by robots

It's not going to be long at all before the bulk of humanity is replaced by robots; that humans are still useful in the highest levels of intellectual fields is for all purposes irrelevant, the labor based economy will crumble far before unemployment reaches 50%. If robots put the lower half of society out of work, it's game over for our current economic system regardless of whether we have strong enough AI to replace engineers.
> AirBnB's valuation is 25B. It could make a trivial dent in the worldwide hotel market and crush that valuation many times over.

How defensible is the model when then either don't own the real estate (even McDonalds is famous for making money this way) or have contracts to manage the real estate (as many hotels that are now management companies do).

Right now they may seem to own both the people who have places to rent and the people who want to rent but in no way is that as solid as having actual hard assets (or even long term contracts and most importantly a hotel brand). Or even in the case of an Amazon warehousing and logistics (or owning actual data centers).
Zillow did a 1:3 split in 2015. So really, that one should be $40 to $22.
This happened to a coworker of mine, when he was flying from the midwest back to San Francisco. He had $15,000 cash on him and it was noticed at security. As he was boarding the plane, government officials grabbed him and took the money.

However, it did happen to be money he had made selling drugs several years prior. They had identified him as a convicted felon with a drug related offense and connected the money to it.
That doesn't seem an alternative, so much as it seems one potential (particularly smooth) approach.
1. https://localbitcoins.com/
Ah right, my spinal condition is called syringomelia, it's a cavity that forms in your spine and progressively damages the nerves, the best case is constant high level neuropathic pain for the rest of my life, the worst is it destroys the nerves and I end up in pain and crippled, mine is thoracic which means I'm a lucky one (cervical it can also destroy the nerves that control your ability to breathe, beat your heart or move your upper body).

At the moment the medication keeps me functional but if it went worst case I'd take a 50/50 chance of dying from a replacement than been in the kind of pain the people I've seen with the worst case.

Also while the medication works it makes me extremely "fuzzy" some days and has trashed my short term memory, neither of which is an enjoyable experience for someone who loves to program/play chess etc.

As an aside though, going through the experience above as well as having loved ones has given me an idea for a project that might benefit a lot of people (and earn some money which is nice), it's something that doesn't exist and it's not something I would have thought of doing if I hadn't got ill/grown up with a disabled mother.
Nope. Been doing this 20 years, tried them all.
The biggest mistake is, they report all memory allocations as 'leaks'. Instead of just repeated allocations without corresponding freeing. So you get 1,000 reports of which 1 or 2 are really problems.

Then they like to carp about exactly how the memory was freed, which primitive etc. Which can matter when multiple heap disciplines are in use. But when they aren't its just more noise.

I remember an embedded fibre channel router we did, 16 processors and 100's of server message handlers. We tried a heap validation tool of some sort (valgrind?) and after a week of struggle we found exactly one sort-of problem ( a small leak ) out of the thousands of false alarms. Definitely not worth the effort.
> I know a bunch of people who are deeply creative, artists and musicians and such, who spend enormous amounts of time volunteering their productivity - or what's left of it, after "earning a living". I'd love to see them with the opportunity to not have to worry about eating, so they could make things instead

Well, I'd love more time for my hobbies too, however it's not realistic to think more time spent doing pleasureful activities will yield more productivity in general. The world is filled with musicians and artists, but very few of them actually produce anything beneficial to society.

Art and music are important components of society, but the influential pieces come from a very small minority, and that's unlikely to change. The successful people are more closely paralleled with an entrepreneur than a typical street artist... they posses the drive and motivation to do what it takes to become great. This involves schooling/training, often more than 40 hour work-weeks, managing people and the business around your work, etc. Everyone else is a hobbyist, producing things for self-consumption in large-part, which does not contribute towards society in a meaningful way.

The people we're discussing here are the types that loathe and bemoan a 20 hour workweek, let alone a 60+ hour workweek the Jay-Z's of the world find routine.

> Jobs pay because no one would do them if they didn't pay.

I disagree. There are many types of occupations which do not pay (volunteer work comes to mind). Further, if there was no means to generate income, there wouldn't be a way to purchase goods, which in turn keeps others employed, etc. In a society where things are all totally provided for free, society will stop innovating (there's no reason to push the boundaries anymore).
Pretty cool thing to exist, but I'm going stay away in effort to keep my life clutter free and junk drawer somewhat empty.
For a PayPal employee to post here and say he made a team aware and they are working on this it's utterly laughable.

There was a post here on hn over two years ago for the same issue which was top post and generated a lot of news.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6526481

It is obviously very well known to them for years but they continue to do it
If you keep your left mouse button pressed you can cheat too.
On the average techies know and appreciate it. Business types and CXO's don't (by and large). I wanted a donation budget and my boss replied "what do we get for that?". I explained, after picking my jaw off the floor. No budget thou.....
Nice. I'd previously written a similar FUSE-based one-way filesystem, but I never did publish it. "Go laziness!"

The two applications that caught my eye were "home security cameras" (which the docs allude to) and secure telemetry.

You have a device (say, a drone) that logs telemetry data, but if the drone is lost, the data cannot be recovered by a third party without the private key.
I am just pointing out who is losing the money. The fact that a large amount of this money is coming from pension funds trying to hit totally unrealistic returns in a zero interest environment is just an unfortunately coincidence.
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.
Pretty pessimistic - I'd suggest that only a small minority are influential precisely because of the making-a-living issue. Some of the most influential are lucky art-lottery-winners, not geniuses.

And I wouldn't worry about society falling around our ears if the work ethic is replaced by a creative-energy ethic or something like that. I'd love to try it.
Economists are like meteorologists, they can always explain why they were wrong yesterday.

I pity them really. They desperately want to make a solid argument derived from data, but the data they used and the way the split it between innovation derived growth and rent seeking derived growth is spectacularly wrong.
In the 1950's, the USSR was the second largest world economy, the first into space, and living conditions were arguably far better than what preceded it in Eastern Europe, especially when you consider they lost ~20% of their population in WWII.

You can't compare anywhere on earth to the 'West' because the 'West' started out ahead of everywhere else in the world in the 1900s, partially a result of colonialism and various conquests.

Communism created some of the fastest growth rates in history, albeit at a cost, and of course as time went on, corruption became a problem.

If you want to see how poorly capitalism can function, go visit a 3rd world country. Most are capitalist, and they fail because of massive corruption, and anyone with a brain simply flees for the West.
Perhaps I'm missing something obvious, but why can't the filename be encrypted as well?

(So you have public key 0xDEAFBEEF; you want to write a file named 'secret.txt' with the contents 'We attack at dawn'. OweFS encrypts 'We attack at dawn' to 010101 and writes that to 'secret.txt'. But why couldn't it have encrypted the contents to 010101 and encrypted the filename 'secret.txt' to 111000, and then written a file named 111000.encrypted with the contents 010101? Then when the owner of 0xDEAFBEEF wanted to read it, he simply decrypts 111000.encrypted to 'secret.txt' and decrypts its content 010101 to 'We attack at dawn.')
This ... is complicated.

If you have someone in your family going through Alzheimer's or dementia, you suddenly realize that there is a spectrum of functionality as a human being.

There is no single point where there is changeover from human being who is "functional" and "not functional". There is no bright line where we can say "this person is still responsible for their actions" and "this person is no longer responsible for their actions and the someone must step in".

We, as modern societies, do NOT handle this with any amount of grace.
The effective tax rates back then were still higher than today. You're right, they weren't 92%, but they were higher.
There's a follow-up to this post here: https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/englehardt/the-web-privac...

And here's our open-source tool that we've been using to do all these privacy measurements: https://github.com/citp/OpenWPM/

We'd love to see pull requests or just other people using our tool for new interesting findings.
Ok. Here's a response to his central argument:

pg argues we shouldn't attack inequality itself because inequality has both good and bad causes and is thus amoral. He argues we should focus on the bad causes instead.

I disagree. Inequality may have good and bad causes, but it is not amoral. Persistent transgenerational inequality is, by definition, the breakdown of democracy, meritocracy, and universal opportunity, and it is bad, even if it is caused by good things.

Inequality is a bad side effect of (usually) good processes. We already have an economic term for this: It's a negative externality - like environmental pollution.

The similarities between inequality and pollution give me considerable pause for thought. Both can grow or dissipate over time in the right conditions. Both are growing much too quickly right now, threatening to cause severe damage to our biological and economic ecosystems.

It is important that we recognize inequality as categorically bad, even when it is caused by good things like entrepreneurship. This allows us to have real discussions about how we keep inequality - like pollution - under control.

Ironically, this will preserve the democratic and meritocratic tendencies that have made the past 50 years such a great time for startups.
Personally liable doesn't help. All that does is encourage a lazy police force, where individuals aren't apt to do anything for fear of losing everything.

Institutional responsibility does work. If the police department faces real consequences, they'll figure out a way to clamp down on it. Maybe it's firing officers that are out of line. Maybe it's simply better training and guidelines. No matter what, if the organization as a whole suffers from unreasonable seizures, they'll figure out a way to avoid those consequences in a robust way.
The inability to edit or append to files is not really a fundamental limitation of this approach - it would just require some more bookkeeping. Reading back data, of course, is (by design) impossible.
That's damning with faint praise, if the best thing you can say about the Bitcoin community is that at least it hasn't monopolized its capacity for violence.
Could, should, and would probably have three very different answers.
Rocket Internet faces new setback with loss of senior managers
It's hard to come up with examples of consumer tech/products where it's considered just part of the way things are to have an event resulting in serious injury or death even though a properly maintained product was used as directed and there wasn't a clear external factor (e.g. brakes don't work on ice). I suppose some failures due to age. Drug side effects to a degree (but see Vaccine compensation fund). However, in general, such things routinely result in lawsuits in any case.
Jet.com won't beat Amazon because they are selling a subset of Amazon's products for higher prices with a worse interface.
There's another way (at least theoretically). We could reduce the power of the government, particularly its ability to influence the economy. That reduces the feedback loop from the other side. The rich can buy the political process, but they can't use it to get more money or to have great power.
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/straddle.asp
Microsoft open sources Edge JavaScript code, plans Linux port
I like Krugman, and agree with him on this; though it's quite an example of Betteridge's Law. Obviously vast inequality isn't necessary, there are plenty of historical examples of merely ordinary inequality (and even a few of almost-equality). To me the question his piece begs is "how do you legislate redistribution when your lawmakers are beholden to the vast amounts of money the super-rich happen to have?"
If it ends up in court they're going to make the case that they can't be expected to address problems they don't know about.
Except that the music industry has gone back to DRM. Most people I know consume their music using streaming services these days and I'm under the impression that e.g. Spotify are forced to use DRM by the content owners.
GOV.UK Puppet Manifests open sourced
I doubt it. Pilots are a pretty trivial cost in airline operations and there are a lot of reasons to have a human who is definitively in charge on the aircraft.
Still problematic. If you removed all due process, a hypothetical police officer could grab someone they're reasonably certain is a criminal and throw them in prison. They could also grab someone they are reasonably certain cut them off on the freeway and throw them in prison. Just because suspending due process makes it easier to apprehend criminals isn't the point. Due process wasn't included in the Constitution because of naiveté.
> Basic income almost seems like a measure focused on finding ways for people to be unproductive.

Yet, "the dole" provided for J. K. Rowling as well as Noel Gallagher of Oasis before they became famous. I'm sure there are others. We, as a society, would nominally be worse off without these people.
Obviously well known?

Guy at PayPal sees post, tells a technical person about it, said person forgets about it. Suddenly PayPal doesn't know about it anymore.

Or a person wants to work on fixing this but a manager says no, because there are other priorities.

Or a person starts working on this, quits, and it gets lost among the things they were working on.

It's so easy for things to get lost in a company, even with all the bug trackers in the world.
The most odd-ball of the lot seems to have been edited largely by one person [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Geospatial_summar...
For what it's worth, I don't dispute at all that the quality of CSS specs from the W3C has improved over time. However, specs are means to an end, and the usefulness of any spec is inevitably dictated by the implementations that exist.

As a professional, I truly wish this weren't the case, but as a professional, my job is to make a working site, not necessarily a standards compliant one. All too frequently, it is still not possible to do both at the same time, either because browsers don't implement W3C recommendations consistently, or because of the poor quality of implementation you alluded to yourself, or because even when browsers did provide a useful implementation yesterday someone broke it in an update last night and today I'm rewriting something a different way because platinum support customers started calling first thing this morning and get a same day response not a 6 week one.

"Of course I understand that it's the update we just rolled out to our corporate standard browser that broke your standards-compliant and otherwise normally functioning site," said no customer ever. :-)
Is it an issue? Of course you could spend millions to buy mining hardware. The issue in bitcoin is more that you spend millions on novel mining hardware nobody else has. If your hashing function is CPU or GPU friendly, suddenly everyone in the economy has hardware capable of potentially mining your crytocurrency. The problem with bitcoin is that those hundred million dollar datacenters are the only places top of the line SHA256 hashing hardware is found. If they were just GPU cluster datacenters, despite their scale, they still would not compete with the distributed power of millions of home users desktops to as much a ludicrous degree as modern ASIC miners are in the bitcoin space.
Show HN: Live Air Traffic Over the SF Bay Area
I don't think we need to group medicine as one thing that is too risk or conservative. We need to evaluate different branches of medicine. In the current culture, we have a bias to accept more risk from surgery than pharmaceuticals.

Imagine you want to be appear more muscular. You could get implants under general anesthesia or you could take steroids. The first is legal, but the second is illegal. It is illegal because society deems that taking steroids is excessively risky. However general anesthesia and surgery are orders of magnitude more dangerous.

This same bias present throughout medicine. Many surgical procedures and tests would never pass the FDA's requirements for pharmaceuticals.
What do you think of Quasar fiber[1]?

[1] http://docs.paralleluniverse.co/quasar/#fibers
There's a lot more to defeating traffic analysis than random padding: http://freehaven.net/anonbib/cache/oakland2012-peekaboo.pdf
I'm impressed they picked some of the best games for this. I paid for The Pit, the registered version had enhanced features, excellent game. Unfortunately, it wasn't popular on my BBS. I also liked OOii which had very unique graphics for the time, toxic wasteland theme. TW2002 was by far the most popular and I had people paying me subscriptions to play it. It was almost an exact copy of Yankee Trader, which makes me think maybe Yankee Trader deserves credit for the idea. But TW2002 had much better graphics. The fishing game was surprisingly fun and made with loving care, you could actually see the fishing line animated in ANSI! Also very popular (#2 behind TW2002) was Global Wars, not in the article, which was exactly like RISK the boardgame. The article doesn't mention MajorBBS at all, which is unfortunate, because they had their own unique ecosystem that had a loyal following, and although it was very expensive (pay by the minute) it was extremely addicting.
> By no means am I a right-wing/vigilante militia supporter, but this type of behavior from the police makes me support having a heavily armed citizenry.

Do you mind elaborate how firearm would help with combating civil forfeiture?
Trying it in decimated cities like Detroit would also be interesting.