skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd be curious to see if certain locations trigger surge pricing, too. My wife and I got sideswiped about a month ago, had to go to the ER in Austin.

Got out, had no way to get back to our truck, nor to our house an hour outside Austin. Called Uber, figuring we'd at least get a ride back to the truck to get our stuff, and see if any friends could take us the rest of the way home.

Despite nothing going on in town that night, and only being about 8:30pm, the app warned me of surge pricing, saying it would be 1.5x the usual fare. Didn't have many other options, and had been happy with Uber in the past, so went ahead.

Driver was cool, and not only took us back to the truck, but drove us all the way home, complete with a flat tire we helped him change on the side of a busy, dark toll road, and running out of gas.

Wound up being $98, and that guy really earned his tip. I still wonder if the fact that we called from the exit of the ER triggered surge pricing, though. Not a great time to experiment, but I could've probably walked a few blocks and tried again, if my wife wasn't in the shape she was in at the time.
One of the big game journalism outfits did an hour long "Let's Play" with Jonathan Blow, where they showcased The Witness and talked about many of its design decisions.

My favorite part was where Blow talks about how the puzzle idea started from an RPG-style game where you cast spells by performing gestures on-screen, where certain aspects of how you drew symbols (ie: speed, size) determined the traits of the spell cast. I always had that idea myself.

However, after exploring the idea a bit, he realized that it wasn't really much fun to do elaborate gestures when what you really wanted was to merely cast "Fireball 1", which you would do a thousand times in the course of the game. What was really fun was the lore-related ways in which you could teach spells to the player, by having them find them carved as runes into the scenery and such.

So he made a game about that phenomenon of "discovery" instead. I thought it was brilliant insight.
OpenEmu: Retro video game emulation for OS X
How the West (and the Rest)  Got Rich
I think that matrices seem difficult because they are taught by teachers who don't know how they play a role in geometry. Even points and vectors can be hard if the teacher doesn't show how to connect their algebra and their geometry.

Example: a parametric line segment: P(t) = t * A + (1 - t) * B: If t is 0, you get A. If it's 1 you get B. If it's 0.5, you get halfway between A and B. If negative, you're 'before' A. If t > 1, you're 'beyond' B. Then it's easy to see that restricting t > 0 gives you a ray. The geometry matches the algebra nicely.

Example: in ray tracing, you have to test whether a ray intersects a sphere. This gives you a quadratic equation. If the equation has two real roots, the ray hits the sphere twice. If just one real root, it touches it once (one hit point: ray is tangent to sphere). If no real roots, the ray misses (no hit points). I love how the algebra and the geometry correspond so nicely.

Once you tell a student that applying a matrix will change an object's shape, it's easy to get them to see how applying two matrices means applying two shape changes. Then if you apply the changes in opposite order, you get a different matrix product, and a different final shape. Again, the algebra corresponds to the geometry. And you've just taught them about non-commutative multiplication!

And then I show them a translation matrix, and the inverse of the translation matrix (I don't teach them how to invert matrices; why bother them?). And I show them that the inverse makes sense: the translation amounts are the negatives of the original. And I show them that the product of those two matrices is the identity, which again matches the geometric fact: move, then un-move, is the same as doing nothing.

I talk about rotations using my body: I turn around the X axis, then the Y axis. The I repeat it in opposite order, and show that rotations usually don't commute.

What I'm trying to say is that matrices are confusing because teachers SUCK at explaining them. For the small subset of linear algebra that graphics needs, there are a lot of geometric intuitions that make it simple to explain the material.
Knight Rider, surely.
This article is nonsense -- but if you're in SF visit the store, the space feels good to walk through.
I have to ask for clarification. Did you run out of gas, or did you only run low on gas?

Running out of gas seems like a real unfortunate thing to have happen during a paid ride and falls pretty squarely on the shoulders of the driver.
I feel like having a loud, continuous whirring noise buzzing out of your stall wouldn't improve things much in the embarrassment department.
Here's where your analogy breaks down: what if the state of AlphaGo enhancers was as good as AlphaGo AIs? Could the current state of the art AI beat a human working with a state of the art augmented AI based assistant?

The lack of an answer is an interesting question, and I wonder how much it has to do with cultural concerns. Obviously, "machine beats man at intelligent task" is a lot sexier in some ways.
Regarding nulls, have a look at how Haskell deals with nulls. The basic idea is that any nullable value gets wrapped in a "Maybe", and you use pattern matching to handle the case of missing/empty values. This is much more explicit than null values in Java, where any object could be null at any time, and actually leads to cleaner code (i.e. to avoid lots of "Maybe" boilerplate, you can match for "Nothing" and return a default value as soon as possible to first matching "Nothing").

Regarding illegal arguments, have a look at something like Idris, which has a type system with "dependent types". The Wikipedia page has an example[0]; types can have values, so you can express a "pairAdd" function that accepts two vectors, each vector requiring the same length.

I guess "types" and "compile-time checks" are sometimes used interchangeably. I absolutely think tools (such as compilers) should be leveraged to provide as much assistance as possible; whether that comes in the form of types, or some other mechanism that resembles types.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idris_(programming_language)#D...
[video] HackingTeam hacker PhineasFisher compromising a police website
I'll buy from Apple if it's an iMech. You know it will look stylish and unlike almost every other robot movie around. Because that's what they do best.
That sounds like fun, but I can't think of any reason why I would ever need to visit a bank, or keep more than a trivial amount of money in a bank with physical branches, when their interest rates are so low.

What are the tangible benefits of a non-Internet bank these days?
Passive Wifi: Bringing Low Power to Wi-Fi Transmissions
I guess what NYTimes articles praising liberal arts education miss out on is following:

No one is denying importance of learning history, literature, etc. What people have begun doubting is if its really worth to spend 200k$ & four years majoring in liberal arts alone, vs. Majoring in Computer Science while taking courses in / reading literature.

This article is equivalent to telling a competitive swimmer, to study calculus since Navier-Stokes equations governing fluid dynamics (and thus water) require understanding of calculus to be solved.

The question worth answering is why quality liberal arts education still has such a high price tag? Especially when the monetary returns are so poor?
Of course you can, but you can call them right back when you aren't busy anymore.
Have you worked at any of those businesses? They are built largely on convincing the day-to-day workers to sacrifice for a vision, a vision whose benefits will only come back to them in a small way.

And most of what they're selling, when they sell the company, is the employees. You're being traded for big stacks of cash. Which you will never see, no matter how many late nights and weekends you put in (btw, the owner will never be there on those weekends)
I know at least one person who still lived in an apartment like the that in Greenwich Village in 2012, but yes, the vast majority of those have since been renovated.
In practice, and in name, China is a republic. The leadership of the CCP are elected by it's 80+ million members. [1] Power resides in elected individuals representing the party members. Party membership is not easy, but not too difficult either. [2] One could make the analogy, joining the party is the PRC's version of enrolling to vote, which happens to be a much more complicated process than in the U.S. Not everyone is allowed to become a party member, but that is also true in the U.S and other countries, where some or all prisoners have no right to vote.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_the_People%27s_Re...

[2] https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-join-the-Chinese-Communist-Pa...
I did some self modifying code just 10 years back on an firmware for a chip with an 8-bit CPU and a custom sequencer for data transfers. The sequencer was flexible but somewhat inefficient so it was incurring 30% overhead on some opcodes. A lot of the times when the sequencer was doing its job, the CPU would just poll for the sequencer completion. So what I did is split the sequencer code and moved some of the work to the CPU. To synchronize the two programs, I had the sequencer do its work and then jump on a register. Initially the register was set to jump back to PC causing it to pause. The CPU would do its bit then set the register to cause the sequencer to jump to then bit of microcode to execute. So the sequencer had efficient little subroutines while the CPU would make the decision to switch between them. End result the whole thing ran 30% faster and I was able to convert a bunch of assembly code into C which was easy to read. After that I spent my time pushing the chip designer to make a proper sequencer and CPU design.
Software Performance and Scalability: A Cheatsheet [pdf]
Bug report - the email registration doesn't like nonstandard fqdns like .io. :)
Personally having learnt 8086 in High School, made job of understanding pointers easy. In my opinion the real hard things in CS are often distributed system/computations/clocks which require a radically different perspective.
Drive 2: The Uber Years Official Trailer (2016) Ryan Gosling
The company has determined that customers are more willing to accept surge pricing if they have a medical emergency and need to get to the hospital. Oh, your battery is low too? Well, now you are really screwed. Dynamic pricing!
Watch NASA inflate the space station's expandable habitat
Shhh, don't tell Uber/Lyft, but I would gladly pay more than taxi rates to use their service. In my view, price is hardly the primary advantage they have over taxis.
World's Largest Solar Plant Sets Itself Ablaze Due to Misaligned Mirrors
Even in Canada today you can still see instances of this. Fairly disgusting, to put it mildly. I found this out when we employed the one person of color in the community as a gas station attendant, the reverse situation sketched in the wikipedia article linked. Large customers would contact me and pointedly demand we fire the person or they'd cease doing business (this was fine with me, the nearest alternative was a 90 km round-trip and not serving them for a couple of weeks taught several of those customers expensive lessons about racial intolerance, I suspect that they did not change their mentality even if outwardly they eventually relented and begged to be served again).

Assholes.
We get to vote for local representatives in our trade union. I mean, the trade union organizes the voting, but us non-citizen members aren't allowed to participate. They give you one name to vote for, BUT IT IS STILL DEMOCRATIC because you can write someone else's name in if you want. You get one name to vote for, but you can vote for anyone - so wise!

Likewise, when party members vote for congress party members, the decisions are often pre-determined. Ironically enough, Xi Jinping actually lost a vote once:

> Xi held posts in the Fuzhou Municipal Party Committee and became the president of the Party School in Fuzhou in 1990. In 1997, Xi was named an alternate member of the 15th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. However, out of the 151 alternate members of the Central Committee elected at the 15th Party Congress, Xi received the lowest number of votes in favour, placing him in last place in the rankings of members, ostensibly due to his status as a Princeling.[a][20]

Of course, it didn't matter much, because votes are..well..even under the perverted Chinese system where outcomes are almost always predetermined, if they are not what is wanted, they are just fudged anyways.

And everyone knew Xi Jinping would get elected even before the first vote was cast by the party. There wasn't like any suspense, there were no odds in London. This year in the US, it is not certain that Clinton or Trump will will the POTUS election...we have hunches, but there is no certainty.

Calling China a republic is like calling North Korea a republic. Technically true, but ultimately meaningless.
But the parent comment never claimed that the treatment is guaranteed to be a quack, only that the claim shouldn't be trusted in it's current state. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. By not following proper procedures for the trial, that evidence isn't there.
It's pretty ironic that Khosla would find Macbeth less than useful.
There's a epistemology problem in modern science.

There was a reddit AMA a while back about some guy who was paralyzed and got stem cell treatments in China and can walk now[1]. In the thread nobody believed him, especially all the people chiming in with lots of credentials. The thread is really sad. The rule seems to be, if the U.S gatekeepers didn't approve it, it doesn't exist, no matter the empirical evidence.

Liz Parrish's gene therapy to increase her telomeres is another example of this. No matter how many labs measured her telomeres before and after, in some people's minds it's not science because it didn't go through the relevant gatekeepers.

[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/k1hts/i_am_a_28yr_old...
5 Challenges New Software Engineers Face
Driverless cars will still err, though. They will err like software. The car won't be distracted, but if a software fault causes a google car to classify a certain make of car as invisible due to its lidar signature, or the glitch it causes in the algorithim, it will be far worse. Human error is significant, but software error probably can be more catastrophic because it can affect a huge subset of cars, much more than human error can.
definitely agree, on the other hand it's funny to see people who put fake birthdays on facebook actually getting the "happy birthday!" messages on the fake date
I believe that where there's a will there will be a way. As it stands most consumers don't care about privacy enough to make changes to their habits.
Ask HN: My wife is learning to program. Would you read her blog about this?
Now that the baby is getting older, my wife has decided to go back to work, and what kind of work is better than writing code for a living?

She's not an absolute beginner; some classes in college and experience working in a data analyst role years ago taught her some basic technical skills. These aren't enough to actually work in our industry, but form a sufficient basis to take the next few steps towards becoming a programmer.

My wife wants to write up her experiences as she goes. She's going to do it anyway, for the sake of posterity as well as showing our daughter how it's done. The question we have is this:

Would anyone in the large blue world be interested in reading something like this in blog form? She isn't envisioning a high-volume publication, more like an occasional diary entry detailing experiences & challenges, triumphs & the occasional crisis.

What say you, fellow hackers? Is there value in this writing?
Sorry, I'm not 'looking for work' as in handing out resumés, looking for a 9-5. The acquisitions are in the 7-figures. But I am always looking for new opportunities -- new startups to work with, etc.

I do really like your point about focusing on the operational metrics and processes, instead of the acquisition value.
I'm not certain that this is what the OP was referring to, but this is what I thought of:

http://www.possupply.com/media/catalog/category/4850-CC-Impr...

It's a machine that you use with copy paper and slide it over the card. The name and numbers are raised up on most credit cards and leave an imprint on the paper. The cardholder then signs the paper.

I've used them when I worked at a department store for customers who's magnetic strip had worn out to the point that our computers couldn't read the card. I imagine the main reasons for a taxi driver to use one is that 1) it's cheap and reliable, and 2) it works offline.
I just wanted to use this opportunity to plug one of my projects, Radical. It addresses some of the issues raised in this article. Specifically, Radical eliminates the state-structure coupling inherent in Redux applications, simplifying reducer code and making it easy to write modular applications. It doesn't hurt that it eliminates a LOT of Redux boilerplate in the process :)

Compare the shopping cart example I produced using Radical to the one in the Redux github repo, the difference is night and day.

http://www.nathan-rice.net/projects/radical/
Shouldn't the treatments you refer to be called "traditional" instead of "non-traditional"? Most of what we do in Western medicine is modern and not ancient.
Why would there be no competition to Uber? Are they lobbying for traditional taxi companies to be banned from the market?
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51bClUYQTPL._SL1000_.j...

They take an imprint of the embossed credit card details for later processing
Since when did two different tabs opened on the same site share any JavaScript interpreter state, or block each other when showing modal dialogs?

They share cookies, sure, but that's a very different thing that JS interpreter state.

But I've never heard anything about an alert in one tab blocking the JS interpreter of another tab on the same site, as that would certainly break the principle of least astonishment. Where is that behavior documented?
There most certainly is. You've pointed out some exceptions but do you really think that on the whole they're not correlated? Having more money means people can afford to dress better and are more likely to travel in circles in which dressing well is important.

This may be a bad thing, but it's a reality that people are attuned to - it's a useful heuristic even though it's imperfect. Should you treat people badly because of it? No, but you shouldn't treat them badly even if you were 100% sure they weren't wealthy. That's a separate problem.
branding. you can get a liberal arts education for a fraction of the cost by traveling the world for the same amount of time. but that's unfortunately not apparently worth much to anyone. but the liberal arts education brand and rhetoric are as strong as ever.

my take, most people are machines in terms of work. their employers could care less who they are as people as long as they do the work, take orders, and don't create unnecessary shit. maybe just maybe you might be able to wiggle your way into management if you have a liberal arts education, but then you need to spend just as much time getting good at writing code, and doing it constantly 9-5.

better a computer science degree and an mba if that's what your goal is... and spend two years before that backpacking to round yourself out.
I don't foresee such a future. Previously the barrier to entry by Uber, Lyft, etc. was government regulation. With those entrants the market is effectively deregulated. Short of the taxi cartel joining forces with the Uber drivers, Uber becoming "shitty" won't happen because people would switch to Lyft or back to taxis.
Monotonic Versioning Manifesto
I'm down. Not clear on the $20/month with the $13/GB plan. Is that $20 for the acct and then an extra $13 per gig per month and does it rollover (the gigs)? Anyways, apparently your co. only accepts iphones and nexus devices, or something. I won't be able to unlock mine 'til Nov. and based on my imei it at present is not compatible. Bookmarked.
I used to work in an office which used fanless thin clients instead of normal desktop PCs. It was fantastic. Since then, normal offices filled with desktop fans have seemed almost painful to my ears. It makes a real difference by the end of the day.
Not the GP but Uber has its Android Pay promo going right now, that was my last freebie.
Most of them don't even have monitors. I'm assuming it's some shitty hip cowork space.

Best thing about slack for me is that it's an interface to send alerts/reminders/metrics to my team and I, but I'm one of those people who loathe email.
Binwalk is great, I love extracting stuff from big binary blobs of router firmware, or dumping all the memory on a Linux computer with LiME (https://github.com/504ensicsLabs/LiME) and using Binwalk to see what's in there!
I once attempted to let the influence of Virginia Woolf guide the way I programmed. After reading The Waves, I therefore decided to create a low-level dialect of Brainfuck with an emphasis on concurrency, a creation which I would use to manage my company's clients.

Eventually I came to the realization that you should make a considerate mental separation between the Waves and the way you program. Literature is full of anti-patterns.
To play on this, theres a big difference between ignoring messages for awhile and having a shared understanding that everyone is ignoring messages.

I think thats where we need to focus.
really depends on the product
Inside the Million-Machine Clickfraud Botnet