skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The right thing for the government to do would be to either deliver on their promise of an artificially scarce market (which they made when they instituted the taxi medallion system) by cracking down on unlicensed operators, or to buy the licenses back off the licensed taxis and then abolish the system and free up the market.

What they're currently doing is like if a shopping mall charged resident shops a hefty fee, but allowed hawkers to set up next door for free, allowing them to sell the same goods for far less.
The weird thing is they don't even have a solid plan for what to do with the money. Or a plan at all, it seems.

The least they could do is create some kind of MassTrans App that shows a user options for navigating the state (uber/lyft/cabs/transit/greyhound etc). Otherwise it seems like collection for the sake of it.
How much is the average GDP per captia in india? Rent? Food? How much is the average low-skill worker make in india vs mass? Is it also 5-10x less?
I mostly agree with you, and I would have wholeheartedly agreed with you 2 weeks ago, but I just read a book ("Listen, Liberal" by Thomas Frank) that makes some interesting points about how liberals have shifted from representing working people to representing professionals, and to worshiping innovation. While free trade and disruptive technology is good for the professional class, it inherently increases inequality.

Frank argues that after the liberal shift, "everyone" now agrees to these pro-business, pro-Wall Street policies, but we don't have to allow rapid disruption freely. We could do what Massachusetts is doing. We could have tariffs and bring manufacturing back. Policy can prevent the inevitable.

I learned about the book while vigorously researching Trump's rise to popularity during the primaries. I personally can't wait for self-driving cars, etc., but I think someone needs to be thinking of the swaths of working people who are afraid of losing their jobs.

I know lots of working people. Many of them don't want to go back to school or get technical training. Many of them don't want to start the next big company. They just want to work their job and go hang out with their family. What do we tell the taxi and truck drivers when Uber shows up with self-drivers, etc.?

I'm new to this line of thinking myself and I know there are lots of counterarguments. I just find it worth a ponder.
Although I agree with you mostly, MMA has had some WTF results here and there, nowhere near as bad as boxing overall though.
I'd argue that all these brackets make it way harder to read.
Oh, now I see. Thank you for explaining your point succinctly.

Though I do not have data to back up my argument, I still reckon the Chinese glyphs/scriptures would have had a better chance of survival.

While I think your point is valid, its disadvantages outweigh the advantage, at least since paper/papyrus was invented.

Being spread out to double in length (double being an arbitrary multiplier) would still be inferior to being dispersed to two physical locations (redundancy). I think this is where don't put all your eggs in one basket holds true.

Plus, important docs must have been actively maintained by hired librarians(?). With human maintenance involved, less in volume could have been an advantage for it is easier to move around and maintain the docs. Ofc, when left out in the wild, it is a different story.

Personally I do not like Chinese character system as it has so high a barrier to entry for learners. I love alphabets, Korean Hangeul, or Japanese Hira/Katakana for this matter. Have you tried learning any of those? :-)
I've never seen a successful government app, certainly there must be one.

Does anyone know of a reasonably useful government app? It's hard enough for normal tech to create useful apps, let alone the over expensive bogged down government.
There is quite a bit of work on representing uncertainty in the Event Calculus.
Exactly. The issue isn't the taxi companies' competitiveness, the issue is that the government is allowing Uber et al. to offer a taxi service without having to follow the same rules imposed on taxi driers.
Most dead stories I see on hckrnews.com are worthwhile.
You pay the premium to live somewhere where nobody's defecated in your drinking water.
Yes, I'm sure.

First, that FT article is terrible. It uses a "desirable 20 sq km slice" of Tokyo as a proxy for the city's population growth, but in reality the city's population growth, by its own accounting, was flat from 1977-1997:

http://www.metro.tokyo.jp/ENGLISH/ABOUT/HISTORY/history03.ht...

Even since 1997 Tokyo's population hasn't grown quickly, going from 12M to 13.5M (12.5%) in 18 years (0.65%, annualized). By comparison SF is a boomtown, having grown by nearly 6% since 2010 (1.2%, annualized; that's nearly twice the rate of Tokyo over the same period):

http://sf.curbed.com/2015/2/4/9995388/sfs-population-is-grow...

Instead, the FT article manufactures a lie by explicitly comparing the population growth in one ward of Tokyo (again, Minato) to that of all of SF over 20 years. It uses this unfair comparison to conclude that SF is growing more slowly than Tokyo. It's possibly the most egregious example of cherry picking I've seen in the press in years.

So the FT article is not to be trusted. But what about that "astonishing fact" about housing starts being more numerous in all of California?

Turns out, it's way less astonishing when you realize that Japanese homes are essentially disposable - the average lifespan of a Japanese home is 38 years (compared to 100 in the US). There's no market for used homes in Japan, and homes become worthless after 15-30 years:

http://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-are-japanese-homes-dispo...

A culture of disposable homes is obviously going to have more construction than one where homes are treated as investments. But what about this zoning change that fixed everything, and made Japan safe for development again?

Oh...that law was passed in 2002, and it mostly had to do with encouraging re-development of blighted spaces in cities across Japan, as well as improving infrastructure and safety:

http://www.toshiseibi.metro.tokyo.jp/pamphlet/pdf/udt2013eng...

It does some useful things - like establishing a class of apartments with no key money or ridiculous deposit requirements - but it's wishful thinking to suggest that this law, passed in 2002, suddenly
made Tokyo real estate affordable.

My argument stands. If you want to know why Tokyo land prices have stayed flat, look at the economy. Japan has been struggling to find growth for nearly two decades, its population is flat/declining, and it is struggling with deflation. Everything else is a detail.
It should be totally opposite:

1) uber drivers are in lower income than taxis drivers

2) uber economy is new and innovative, while taxi is old and dying
During periods of extremely high surge pricing, I take regulated taxis instead. At first I think, 'wow I love competition its such a good thing this alternative service was around' but then I try to pay the cab driver, here is the experience in 2016:

- The meter system is broken

- The cab driver presses buttons frantically on a black box before resorting to hitting it in hopes that it responds to external stimuli

- The cab driver is unsure how to process credit cards (or even cash) in the event this black box does not start responding "Uhhh, ahhhhh, this stupid thing"

- If black box does begin responding, then lets advance to the credit card processing part, which also doesn't work

- FUTURISTIC WORLD CITIES in the US have taxis with screens in them so the rider can do the credit card processing on their own, except this doesn't work either "your screen isn't responding..."
There are two competing narratives about ride-hailing apps success:

1) They are profitable because they are finding loopholes in relevant legislation, or,

2) they are profitable because they are injecting competition and new ideas into a stagnating industry dominated by government-protected monopolies (or oligopolies).

Your opinion of the law will likely depend on which narrative you find more persuasive.
It's been installed by default since Windows 7 and PS v2. The only version that wasn't installed by default with a Windows release was PS v1 (introduced at the same time as Vista).
>What I am saying is that in English, after learning 26 letters, you can read any combination of them.

No. After learning 26 letters you're no better off than before. You can't read, because you don't know the meaning of the words. Vocabulary is learnt separately from the writing system, unlike in Chinese or Japanese. On the other hand, with 26 kanji, you'd be able to read and write, but not necessarily speak.

Neither system is better - they're different.
Yes. I discovered that while learning spark. Do the hard part first!
Tesla creates two-year lease option for Model S and X
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12317616
This particular tiresome pedantry was quite interesting. Thanks!
Making Movie Monad–a Tutorial Desktop App with Haskell and Electron
The uniqueness of flowers seems to be the driver of the Buildbot philosophy.
They are pretty clearly profitable for both of those reasons. They are not at all mutually exclusive.
> The cab driver is unsure how to process credit cards

Or, quite frequently, the cab driver doesn't want to process credit cards and are you sure you don't have cash?
or better

3) uber is a taxi company and should follow the same laws and regulations as other taxi companies. Which would of course destroy uber's business model which is based on dodging the law, sorry, "disruption".
> Minor nitpick, but really it only guarantees a successor.

That's from the consistent hashing chapter. That uses a ring usually [0,2^p-1]. With p=160 if SHA is the hash algorithm. Then the predecessor of 0 is then 2^p-1.
> lingua franca doesn't actually refer to what I think most people associate it with

Wikipedia users also make that mistake: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Common_language&r...
The idea is to solve the hardest problem and most of us will get stuck to it because it won't be easy to find the beginning of the problem. So, it's imperative to decide the origin of the problem. The origin of the problem might look very basic, but that is where you got to start. It's very important to go in the direction of solving the hardest problem than going in the direction that makes money.
uber is not a taxi company
I doubt that. This (apparent) phenomenon is more easily explained by people's difficulties tolerating strongly opposing views. That sounds odd, because we all think we're good at that, but really we're not.

Having strongly opposing views in your face is unpleasant, even a sort of painful, and we react to this by constructing stories about how the opponent isn't just wrong but bad (disingenuous, dishonest, astroturfing, a shill). The alternative is to accept that honest, smart, committed people might hold an opposite view to yours, but because our own views are so strongly held, that feels much less likely than it should.

In other words, claims that HN is rife with shills, etc., seem mostly to be un-self-reflective indications of how diverse the community is.
Note that this is only looking at the embeddings side of FastText (which looks quite impressive).

The classification side is equally interesting, and is better compared to things like VW, eg http://nlpers.blogspot.com.au/2016/08/fast-easy-baseline-tex...

VW is a pretty strong baseline here, so equaling it is a good accomplishment.
We're using Elixir + Phoenix at http://udio.ai/ (with Postgres and Mongo). It's an absolute dream to work with. Best backend environment I've ever used. There are just so many niceties one runs into at every corner: doctests, umbrella projects, :observer.start, etc.
Sounds like a pop style rewrite of what Noam Chomsky has been saying for eternity. Except less well cited, and accurate as Chomsky's work is.

An excerpt if anyone is interested like I was,

http://harpers.org/blog/2016/02/nor-a-lender-be/
> I don't want to see cab drivers turn into homeless drifters

This is wrong. This is exactly how they want you to think. Cab drivers are not going to become homeless or jobless, they will work(drive) for a new companies(I agree if market is healthy enough, which is not).But they frame the issue kind of like "losing job" and "becoming homeless" just because they don't want to change. (I said cab drivers because it is what we talk. Other sectors are the same)

P.S. when it comes to education and health and natural environment, I am 100% pro regulation and government interference(kind of like I am firm communist in those three categories). But other than those three I am 100% percent for free market, and I believe invisible hand will get the job done.
I was more referring to damage to one's professional reputation.
When did I dispute ignorance is a bad thing? I'm just saying that the first stop in fighting ignorance is looking at yourself? What inconvenient facts do you refuse to accept? Where do you apply standards unevenly? Where are you showing confirmation bias?

Telling people from another tribe that they are ignorant has never changed anything.
I may be misunderstanding your question, but perhaps MaidSafe could be of interest to you.
Search for Google Foobar if you're interested in an alternative way to get in contact with a Google recruiter. I was essentially blackholed until I went through Foobar (understandably so since I lack a CS degree; note that this means they may be interested without one). Be aware that they may take upwards of a year to contact you though.
Well plenty of things don't make sense at a first glance but it's all connected.

For example, and I'm going offtopic here, but in USA they have lobbying, which is basically legalized bribe. Then people wonder why they chose to do the taxation weirdness from the article.
Somebody probably got paid to shave % off Uber income, and I'd bet it won't stop here too.

When the system if flawed from the bottom up, you really can't be wondering why some parts of it are illogical. Especially when money are allowed to directly and openly influence people in power.
By this logic, Facebook should be taxed to give money to Myspace.
https://vimeo.com/179599581
Upvotes do not counter flags, users with high enough karma can vouch for flagged posts tho.
If enough users vouch a post can be unflagged.
Are they profitable though?
My bad, uber is running illegal taxi operations in a lot of countries, that's why its illegal taxi service was shut down in many countries and cities around the world.
Hmm, if liberals are so pro-business then why Bernie has so many fans?
Put One Foot Wrong in Baarle and You’ve Left the Country
I can provide an example. I live in Seattle, and use "One Bus Away" everyday. It provides a map showing of all the public bus stops, and real time estimates for bus arrivals at each stop.
I think any modern discussion of event calculus needs to mention causal calculus: http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/if-correlation-doesnt-impl...

This lets you calculate (sometimes) that correlation does imply causation(!)
Hmm:

- an industry wants to operate as cartel,

- but it can't police defectors charging market prices,

- so it gets the government to enforce the cartel,

- and calls this "regulation" even though it gouges, rather than protects the public.

And somehow it is unfair if this gets undermined by events?

To take your mall-and-hawkers example, what exactly is wrong with that situation? In practice it doesn't happen very often because no one is going to give the hawkers space for free.

But if the mall rents were high because the builder bribed the council to keep competition far away, well that's their own fault.
I didn't say anything about not buying paper. I don't know how you extrapolated that.

I prefer books in print but those two philosophies can coexist. Get DRM-free e-material when appropriate, and print otherwise. I prefer manuals in searchable ebook form while books and novels are definitely more pleasing in print.
That concept is not new; have you heard of Menudo?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menudo_(band)

SMAP isn't like Menudo; it doesn't have a rotating membership. SMAP denotes five specific guys.
How surgery got cheaper for many Californians
I tried Homebrew and had lots of trouble with it. I like that MacPorts is isolated so that I don't need to worry about bad interactions with the Apple compilers and libraries.
Just googled Taxi Service. Uber is the third listing under Yellow Cab, and Discount Cab.

Looking at Uber's SEO, they have a lot of listings like "Request taxi cabs from your phone with uberTAXI" on their home page in the source. 52 entries.

Strange for a company that isn't a taxi company to advertise their taxis.
Many of them don't want to go back to school or get technical training... What do we tell the taxi and truck drivers when Uber shows up with self-drivers, etc.?

Uhhh, how about "suck it up and do it anyway"? I know plenty of people on hn are all about the "making the world a better place" shtick and would work anyway/for the sake of it but for the vast majority of people work straight up means doing things you otherwise wouldn't want to do in exchange for income. It's sort of the whole point of offering compensation. Earning money is the carrot on the stick that lures most of us through education and then in to careers. Why taxi drivers should get to be a special exception I would have no idea. Why not people that want to play with cats all day? Or people that want to get paid to move rocks from one pile in their yard to another every day?

Sure there's the question of people not being able to be productive in a work force with a higher skill floor and I'm all for a basic income, but "what if they don't want to" in regard to people working? Crazy.
Interesting. Thanks for the clarification. I find this topic to be of extreme interest
The medallion owners were making an investment. Every investment carries a risk. If they were profiting from their investments then they were not going to share those with anyone else. Why then should others share their losses?
Because he's a democratic socialist?

I love tech as much as the next person, but disrupting wide swaths of the country's working populace and drastically increasing income inequality and increasing unemployment in an unsustainable manner, due to the leverage tech provides, and we step in with laws to override the marketplace.

A government exists for all its citizens, after all. No man is an island.
Sounds like time for some politicians to get voted out of office. Voters may not care about certain things, but they definitely care about their transportation.
Great article, thanks - sleep is good, we really need it...

After having pulled a couple of all-nighters just recently again I can attest (sigh) that they are almost never worthwhile. Your flow and problem solving abilities will be severly hampered pretty quickly (often not apparent enough in the moment unfortunately) trying to get back into your game can then take longer than you would think.

I'm hoping that I will eventually learn my lesson after so many years - the bit about the teleomere shortening in the article might (should) finally help with that, actually it will in any case.
I still use MacPorts because it's actually a proper package management system. Homebrew is not, and its limitations started to show a long time ago. The obnoxious assertion that Homebrew should take complete control of /usr/local AND be able to install in there as an unprivileged user is utterly ridiculous. It's just some nonsense that the author cooked up in his own head, contradicting a long history of convention regarding the use of /usr/local.

The maintainers of packages are supposed to port their software to the relevant platform, that's their job, and yes sometimes this takes some work, whereas Homebrew seems to assume that ./configure; make; make install should flawlessly work out of the box for pretty much anything (this is not true). The fact that they actively discourage even trying to install outside of /usr/local is simply laziness (and not in a good way). This is a foolish and naive approach, and pursuing this idealistic, reductive approach for "simplicitly" breaks down very, very quickly. MacPorts is a well behaved, self-contained system, and a well designed one at that. Homebrew just dumps everything into a system directory that it really shouldn't have exclusive rights to in the first place (/usr/local).

Moreover, there is nothing wrong with installing extra compilers, libraries, etc, under /opt/local and having them run alongside the system libraries. Lots of systems have provisions for doing something like this.

Also, using version control systems as distribution and deployment systems is a horrible anti-pattern and I really, really wish people would stop doing this.

Homebrew's documentation is terrible. Its terminology is facile and stupid in the way it analogizes everything with beer.
Those clever words immediately made sense to me for their inherent meanings the first time I saw them. So they are actually quite useful in their pairings.
Bernie's fans aren't liberals in the sense of the word as describes Democrats who are "liberal" (please see: "New Democrats", "Democratic Leadership Council").
One Bus Away was developed by University of Washington students, not government bureaucrats.
It doesn't make sense to say, "Except for [subset of policy a], I am 100% in favor of [policy a], but for [subset of policy a] I am 100% in favor of [policy b]."

That's like saying, "Except for my student loans, I am 100% debt free." It muddles your point.

Just a nit.
There are a number of these, but most of the big ones are supported (e.g. emacs, vim, python and most common pypi packages, ghc and most haskell packages, ssh, git, ssl, blah blah blah). The main challenge with supporting OSX is that the closed-source nature and/or proprietary license of a lot of the low-level system libraries, especially for graphical applications, doesn't play very well with nix, which does best with HTTP URLs from which (preferably) source code and/or (failing that) prebuilt binaries can be fetched, the contents of which are deterministic.

That said, there are tens of thousands of packages that build on OSX, certainly many more than enough to be a very useful platform for package management, especially when coupled with all of the advantages that nix brings. The downsides are a higher learning curve and occasional missing and/or broken packages.
Working class folks care more about their jobs than Uber's profits (rightfully so).
There is an argument that Bernie is a socialist and almost everyone that cares about Bernie is too. However, when it comes to American political parties, like the "modern" Sith, there can only be two!
I'm curious where you got that impression. Upvotes do counter flags. You might be confusing flagged posts with dead ones (those are closed to new comments and, I think, upvotes). In such cases a post is explicitly marked [dead].
UK Court: ISPs have to block *trademark* infringements
Datastore Changes in 3.0
They're not "driving themselves" in either case. They are executing a program.

Problem is, that makes them rigid and unable to handle anything unplanned for.
> a "social" coding experience

Do people still buy into this? I feel this phrase was just a marketing ploy by GitHub.
I've been foaming at the mouth to try Ao. Are you ever planning to make a Unix or Windows release?
Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but the deep packet inspection systems I've seen to date are passive. They take a copy of the bitstream on the wire and don't impede that stream in the slightest.
Yeah it was confusing at first. I guess that was aimed mostly at people that used Charles 1-3 so far.
If the taxi even shows up at all...