skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Uber's primary barrier to entry is a network effect - if more cars are on Uber that means more word of mouth for Uber less people interested in the other app which means less drivers interested in the other app. They reinforce this not by pure exclusivity deals but by paying drivers who drive more on Uber higher rates (which is a tactic I've seen in the stock photo industry as well, which is also reliant on a marketplace model where a big player brokers access to lots of individual contributors.)

Its secondary barrier is that getting quality software right is more expensive and harder than it looks and benefits from economies of scale. (I don't trust Uber further than I can throw my cell phone but the app is far slicker than Lyft or Karhoo or whatever.)

That's not insurmountable but it's nothing either.
If they wanted to, they should have done it in 10. They can't now, because they promised to support all the devices it could be installed into for their lifetime. Some of those devices are 32bit.
Private companies often want to control who and how many of their shareholders are. It is likely not because they fear being shorted. The market for short selling private companies is currently a very distant threat.

Let's say you place a short bet on Uber through one these "creative" methods that uses a smaller exchange, then you have to worry not just about Uber's price rising, but also that you will not be able to unwind the trade should it become profitable. Doing so could prove to be impossible either for legal reasons (e.g., if Uber or some other company launches lawsuits as their price drops), or if the exchange simply goes belly up. In short, you better be very, very sure that Uber's price will drop substantially in order to make sure a risky bet.
The sizes of lumber and other construction materials are inch based, rounded to mm, even in Finland. Instead of 1/4", 1/2", and 3/4" we have 6.5mm, 12mm and 18mm.

Note the inconsistency in 1/4".
Maybe he has a ghost writer.
Thanks for pointing this out, I couldn't find a way to get the ASN for free, so this is a great resource!
Unless you're trying to go somewhere important like say TXL airport. Sorry! That'll take an hour since you have to go train to train to bus!
> Why do we need a person to transcribe a machine message

Because it prevented World War III.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...

> he's going to send them anyway

The good judgment of Stanislav Petrov shows that this isn't guaranteed.

Automation that can harm people always requires a human fail-safe. Leaving judgment to a mechanism only implies either hubris that assumes all possible situations have been accounted for, or enough narcissism to not care about the (possibly deadly) errors.
If I recall correctly 100% of the assets that were withdrawable were actually withdrawed.

edit: Well regardless of that being the case, why would an attacker not withdraw all the funds they can lay their hands on?

Many people seem to believe the bitcoin-exchange-as-a-scam thing is worthwile, but I don't think it really is. Karpeles is in jail, and will be for a very long time, and I've heard he doesn't enjoy his jail time much.

The identities of these people are known, their spending can be tracked. I can't see how the life of a exchange scammer is in anyway more attractive than that of a straightforward exchange runner. What are they going to do, cash out a couple of million somewhere and emigrate to South America? They could do the same simply by selling their exchange. Besides, Dread Pirate Roberts showed that emigrating is not really attractive to many people, even when not doing so is a terrible idea.
Pokémon Go trespassing spurs lawsuit against Nintendo
Oh. Wow. It's worse than I thought.
> BitFinex has been in previous trouble with the CFTC over customer account custody issues.[2] Having multi-sig keys doesn't help if the exchange has the keys.

If bitfinex hadn't implemented the segregated accounts, they would probably be much better off. One reason for segregated accounts was speculated to be the CFTC trouble.
The novel part is causality - obviously sick people are less happy but this demonstrates cause and effect.
Frankly that's a hell of a lot more secure than using the same password to access both facebook and your (possibly confidential) company account.
Here's Chomsky on postmodernism: http://www.mrbauld.com/chomsky1.html
In imperial vs. metric, I don't think the actual units are as big of a difference as the convention of using fractions vs. decimals.

When doing manual work, e.g. woodworking or metalwork it's pretty convenient to use fractions. You tend to divide things in half or quarters.

With most things not made by hand any more, using fractions and inconsistent units like inches, feet, yards and miles is a nuisance for engineers.
I have worked at a US DoD "secure facility". You can imagine the requirements they imposed on password length, characters, frequency of changing, uniqueness, etc. Perhaps you can also imagine that nearly everyone kept their current password written on a sticky-note somewhere in their desk.
That'll certainly help keep the wolves at bay (though I still will not install firejail 4755...).

~1000 commits since I last looked at firejail, keep up the good work!
Isn't that basically what happens inside the Sun's core anyways?
It's a verbatim application of one of the original Christopher Alexander's architectural and urban design patterns. "49. Looped local roads" is the pattern being applied here. Alexander even mentions that a grid can be modified to create the loops although without explicitly mentioning the superblock idea.
Breakthrough Starshot
I agree those may be desirable directions for development, but they don't change the overall dynamics - we expand our capabilities by dealing with more and more powerful, and thus dangerous, stuff. As individual demand for electricity increases with each appliance we incorporate in our lives, the household battery/generator of 2050 could very well be powerful enough to level a city block if weaponized. Even more likely, the same biotech industry that can enable local food production will enable creation of new, deadly pathogens.

Humans, unfortunately, are very optimistic when it comes to workplace and household safety, while at the same time extremely resourceful when they need to make weapons out of mundane objects.
I've read it as a criticism of giving money to a country which is rich enough to fund a space program, when there isn't enough money to fund initiatives at home. Sure, space programs are great, but unlike food and health care they are not a necessity.
So now it is expected of me to learn some programming language's private packaging system, just to use an application?

Nope, that won't fly.
I'm glad to see another project adopting appimage. I'm really hoping this will be the new standard deployment tool.
My operating system wouldn't know about this new content, which means that it would not be automatically reproducible. There would now be a change to the system that the system doesn't know about.

I don't do that. On my system every single change to every single file is encapsulated inside of an OS package. The integrity of the OS content is not compromised in any way, because the OS knows about every single application's file. Emphasis on application's file, as opposed to just raw data.
Maybe I'm just a bitter asshole but when people describe something as "A modern X" it immediately makes me roll my eyes. It tends to be redundant (i.e. you're already saying it uses Flexbox) or passive-aggressive ("my way is the modern way and yours is totally ancient!") or both.
Pixels, really now. Use em and pt units for future compatibility with high PPI screens (and blame windows for 96 PPI standard)
This is interesting. Can we use custom headers/auth when setting up the APIs for health checkups?
Well, assuming that its competition has made it that far. If Uber is years ahead of everyone and has the volume it could expand like crazy and crush future competition on the economies of scale alone.

if.
Why do we still pretend nuclear weapons are necessary when the only military power that still reserves the right to use them in a first strike is also the only power to have forces deployed all over the world?
Absolutely. I'm not sure how much higher density these get, but if it's something like 2x that'd be enough to warrant maybe a 100x price or more - for certain applications.

Apparently current experiments are at 5x if Wikipedia is to be believed. 5x! For something trivial like an ultrabook that's going from 8 hours to 40 hours of battery life! From workday to work week.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium%E2%80%93air_battery
Because people who want to rent their self-driving cars won't buy those, and companies with lower marketshare (therefore, less likely to be able to form a competitive network by themselves) will have an incentive to go after those buyers.

I.e., competition.
Top Challenges That Facility Managers Face Today
no, the way it works in Europe is the taxi drivers blockade the street with burning tires because uber and immigrants driving its cars are stealing their property: customers.
What is a "virtual env"? Why am I expected to know this just to run an end-user application? Is my spare time completely worthless?

Steve Jobs would have had a field day with this one, if he were alive!
Def Con: The hackers bringing Mr Robot to life
Stream Forms
Wow awesome... AI diagnosing diseases have been going around for at least... 30 years? 40 years? Simple decision trees, some data, maybe a bit of neural network, and hop, you've got it. Still, nobody gives a shit about it. You know why? Because the problem is not to make the right diagnosis - it takes only a few seconds to a doctor. It's to set the patient in the right mindset, and to have access to the right treatment.
Exactly. We need to find ways to manage powerful technology socially, or we are going to have serious problems in the near future. Unfortunately, I'm not sure[1] our species can adapt fast enough.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8916033
Am I the only one who noticed that the author's name is Li, which is also the chemical symbol for lithium?
Airbnb Instant book mandatory for some new hosts: learn more + hacks to avoid!
Do most Americans even own their car anyway? I was under the impression most were on finance/leased.
The ANL only has "air" in the title "A Lithium-Air Battery Based on Lithium Superoxide" which you could read as an abbreviation of "a Lithium-Air like battery".
That's ridiculous. If they want to avoid trouble with CFTC the answer is to register with them, not some home cooked idea that segregated wallets would keep them clean. I simply can't believe that the CFTC would take a second look at their BitGo setup and say "sure, go ahead, no need to register anymore". I don't even believe that was the intention, it's wishful thinking in hindsight by the spectators over at Reddit.
Show HN: Dynamic Video API for Developers
Cool service, but I agree with comments below that state the analogy to TinyURL is not quite right.

This seems more like “Find My iPhone” or “Find My Friends” for your car. It’s true those services are most familiar to iOS users, but it’s overall a better analogy.
Thanks for the suggestions, I appreciate it. Alas, at the least, there are Python implementations of all those between scikit-learn and this project: https://github.com/selective-inference/Python-software. statsmodels has GLM capabilities, and there are even Python bindings for R's glmnet FORTRAN library.

I'm not sure how well those compare to the R implementations, but they look well-built at first glance.

Any other ideas out there?
Happened to see that after posting the comment. So it's probably even more common!
Stories is to Instagram what Streaming was to Netflix
People don't need more connectivity. Excess of anything is bad. Social networks and connectivity is already in the realm of being evil and eating away all the time from people's lives.
I probably should have mentioned this in my original post (will amend) but does it handle things like feature/merge requests kind of like how GitHub and GitLab does?
Simple, scalable, distributed mutex (with Go and shell clients)
So if I understood this correctly, web "developers" pull in all these frameworks so that they would avoid writing common code. If the intent is to avoid writing common code and also to avoid pulling in bloat, wouldn't it be logical to turn the problem "upside down on its head" and identify what common code is actually required, and just write / isolate / pull that in? If all those pulls are made just for one to three trivial functions, to me that's not worth the bloat (and frustration).

Lesson I learned from this article: when it's time to write the web portion of my application, write just the minimum of minimum of what I actually need in the GUI in JavaScript, and write as much as possible to run on the server. Don't use frameworks. Don't try to be fancy. Be as functional as possible while being as simple as possible (and no, that doesn't mean "use flat GUI look").
Interesting.

> more word of mouth for Uber less people interested in the other app

This is branding, which I mentioned. Or am I missing something?

> Its secondary barrier is that getting quality software right is more expensive and harder than it looks and benefits from economies of scale.

I'm not sure this is true. The software of Uber does not need to scale larger than, say, the size (in users) of a city. Phrased differently, a city is a natural sharding point. Of course, there is software that needs to use the full dataset (for statistics etc.), but this software can run in batch mode.
Would love to hear your feedback
The 100 best artisan ice cream shops in Italy [Italian]
True, but I think it is sad that IBM uses the Watson name for everything related to AI, because this way they implicitly pretend to have found a unified approach to AI. I don't believe this is true. The AI doing the diagnosing is not the same AI as the one that played Jeopardy. But please correct me if I'm wrong.
Bitfinex was started with the leaked Bitcoinica source code, after it had been hacked. The founders openly talk about trading at their own exchange. I don't know how much more bad light could make a difference. People still trade there because that's where the liquidity is, just like they traded MtGox knowing full well the account database had leaked, it regularly kneeled under pressure etc. That first mover advantage is a problem in the Bitcoin space but maybe that will change with time.
Overall the situation of forests in Europe has been improving since the 90s [0].

In Germany wolves are back [1], elks are beginning to come back [2] and occasionally even a bear visits [3].

Of course this is only partly intended. Many effects - like the German Green Belt [4] - are just a consequence of the fall of the Soviet Union or - like in the article - dying industries. Still I find it very uplifting how fast nature can recover.

[0]: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.FRST.ZS

[1]: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/113...

(2): http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/wild-elks-return...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bear_JJ1

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Green_Belt
I enjoyed ANKOS as much as the next man, but very little of it was original thinking on Wolfram's part.
That was a long piece simply to suggest someone is creating swaps against the valuation.
"Extraordinary gains?"

Ordinary gains are about 4% a year (long-term returns of broad investments in the stock market, adjusted for inflation). If you buy a piece of equipment for $100 it should return $4/year (on top of maintenance costs, depreciation, and the like) otherwise you'll do better by buying a stock-market index fund.

How much do you think it would cost an arbitrary manufacturing company to switch over all their tools and equipment to metric measures, update and test all their designs and schematics, run them through any applicable regulatory agencies, and such? Include the cognitive up-front cost of switching, maintaining dual toolchains and inventories for any gradual transition, the opportunity cost of the profitable projects you would have to postpone while your company experts see to the metric switchover, and everything else. Consider adjusting the return downward a little to account for appropriate risks in this process.

Do you see savings substantially in excess of 4% a year? If so, that's extraordinary, and a worthwhile investment! If not, the company would do better for itself and its shareholders by spending money elsewhere, or returning that money through dividends or stock buybacks so it can be put in a stock market index fund.
No, I vaguely recall it being "Electronic Workbench", but googling for it only brings Windows versions, it was definitely a MS-DOS tool. Maybe I can still find the disks somewhere
I can tell you that's a very detailed article from someone whom might be struggling learning french but is nonetheless very knowledgeable about french culture and its intricacies.
dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12235789
Ha, don't even get me stated on infallibility of modern IDEs. Forgot to index? 90% functionality is off or broken. Want more than one project open? Better have 10 GB memory on the ready. Oh, did someone customizer their key bindings? Or window manager, and the binding now collides?

Ah wait, the integrated debugger has crashed again, so I cannot figure things out. Hey, the thing cannot even open a text data file, because it is not part of the project, whatever that means.

Etc. Most "industrial" IDEs male quote a few simple things way unnecessarily complex.
No, it's just a client, merge requests aren't part of a standard Git install so it wouldn't know where to even save them. (It does handle them when working with a Github repository).

For that Gitlab is certainly the best option – or a private repository at Github. I'd trust their security much more than anything I could roll myself.
Maybe I should say the proponents of it in my country that ignore the monopolistic effects of land and IP ownership.
Also fake/satire.
I think you're making some assumptions. When I was coming up through the school system in the 90s, I thought metrication was a federal government thing (since it is). I doubt my parents are aware of the origins of the metric system. Things may have changed for the youngest generation though.
Russia has dropped No First Use policy in 1993. Besides relying on a written statement from a potential adversary is silly. The capability is always there.
Using Steven Cohen as an example only hurts your argument. His success has nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with insider trading.
Oh great, thanks! Unfortunate that I missed it. Still no luck on the parametric polymorphism though... :(
North-South Industrial Location: What happens when countries integrate?
Seriously, climbing Everest is just glorified russian roulette, mortality rate is more that 5%. I wish people would stop doing it.
openbsd has a simple api, pledge() [0]. The seccomp APIs are more powerful, but also more difficult to use. Are there simplified wrappers available for them that provide something akin to pledge that could just be sprinkled into your application startup?

[0] https://www.openbsd.org/papers/hackfest2015-pledge/mgp00001....
Nadget – Curated Indian Tech News Android App
So, don't do it. The folks that do, aren't going there to die. They're going there to live.
Microsoft, Sony, and others still use illegal warranty-void-if-removed stickers
Tree shaking with UnCSS:
https://github.com/giakki/uncss
Yep. I've done a fair bit of community service on a renewable energy forum and the number of designs that are just laughably wrong is depressing. A number of them were clearly investor scams (windbelt, windtree).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windbelt

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2855155/Now-e...
> you occasionally stumble upon an abstraction leak, and then you need to take a really deep breath, climb down the abstraction ladder

Can you give an example?
"Never trust any company with your privacy, always encrypt." Source: https://www.privacytools.io/
> A city is a natural sharding point.

No no, wrong type of scale. I'm talking economies of scale.

Uber needs to pay N SFBay-area engineers upwards of $200,000 USD/yr (including health expenses, employer-side taxes, and other overhead) for N years in order to build a well-functioning, city-scale software ecosystem - including server software, devops and maintenance tools, payment provider integration, antifraud efforts around payments, client software on multiple app stores, internal tools for the support team, business tools for the traveling consultants who want easier expense report receipts, all sorts of fun data collection for the business analysts, and all the ongoing maintenance and operations costs associated with that mountain of code. With all that effort expended, all those millions spent, they have a bunch of software they can deploy to one, single city and do a top-notch bang-up job of it.

But now this $N million piece of software can be deployed to its second and third and three-thousandth locality with little more than extra computers, some clever sharding work, and maybe some localization: a puny fraction of the original development effort.

If they need a whole new country, throw in some more internationalization/localization and maybe a new payment provider integration.

Those are the economies of scale. Every feature that Uber adds for $N in developer time is hundreds of times more impactful than if Single City Carshare [tm] were to add it, even if they can use cheaper developers outside the Bay Area.

Of course, there are diseconomies too (if only because of managing additional headcount on the per-city operations side of things), but as you said, cities are a natural sharding point, and this keeps those diseconomies down.
"ghostery is missing" for a good reason: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostery#Business_model
Many of the things firejail does can be achieved without suid by using user namespaces instead.

But not all of them. E.g. the setup of network bridges between the host namespace and the jail namespace needs root, or at least cap_net_admin. Docker&co. need a suid broker for the same reason.
> Truth is it's an arbitrary system optimized for a particular set of use cases.

Actually it's an arbitrary system optimised for calculations.
I really don't know what's got into you. You've clearly got some great ideas about what's valuable in programming languages. If you took the time you spent making vague complaints about Haskell and instead spent it pointing out concrete flaws, their consequences, and how to fix them, then we'd all be much better off. I would encourage you to do that.
from the Institute of noetic science - big in psychic research apparently.
A lot less people die climbing Everest than commuting to work. The first group probably enjoys the activity a lot more.

Seriously though, why do you have to throw snark at dead people who have their own lifetime of reasons for doing something you happen not to like? They're not harming you or anybody else. They're certainly not forcing you to climb the mountain. Your comment just manages to be rude, insensitive, pretentious and judgemental all at once - are you going for a record of your own?

Urgh...
> If you want to learn Haskell, forget Category theory

Yes please. Please Don't Learn Category Theory to Learn Haskell: http://jozefg.bitbucket.org/posts/2013-10-14-please-dont-lea...

> learning category theory will likely help you learn Haskell about as much as learning lambda calculus will help you learn Lisp. Maybe a bit less

Much, much less, I would have said
The UK is completely strong enough to invest in areas of need around the world AND in the landscape/enviroment in the UK also.

It's a matter of priorities and political will (both by the UK and Indian government), not ability nor lack of need by those aid is aimed at.