skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hmmm... nothing like near real-time. Challenging near real-time is sub-nanosecond.

Uber real-time requirement of what < 30s? (for a viable product).

No that doesn't seem like a challenging problem. It seems like a problem that would require almost no throught for a MVP, and then incremental challenges as the problem scales.

It seems like a problem that is so comparatively easy compared to what computers are capable of that I wouldn't even class it as "difficult".

But what's telling about your answer is that your thinking about this technical challenge, this feature as being of primary importance.

Do you think if Uber was 10 times cheaper than a regular taxi real-time tracking would be as significant?

Uber's funding which has enabled them to subsidize their expansion (and rides), advertising and promotion and possibly that they plugged in to a easily accessed communications channel (mobile apps). Were likely all more important than the quality of their implementation.
87% of all Smartphones are powered by Linux. Really?
When the main pain point is money, counter offers can be great. When the problem is the job itself or the environment, accepting counter is probably a bad play (except maybe a lateral move in the org, if large enough.)

That's my experience anyway.
And in most cases you will regret the web of mocks you have made :)
What's the best way to get the battery replaced on one of these?
Don't Sam and other YC folks thinks that technological innovation will put most people out of a job, necessitating a "basic income" which makes them permanent government dependents?
I think it's definitely intentional. This profile isn't meant to be purely congratulatory--the undercurrent that some of this is creepy and undeserved that other commentors have picked up on is deliberate.
This is great! Abstracting away static code analysis is very helpful for people like us building browser based dev tools.

I am the developer of HiveMind (crudzilla.com), I have been dragging my feet about plunging into static code analysis so this type of solution is definitely intriguing.
But "perjudicial" is a word in Spanish, meaning "harmful", "detrimental". I think that was the meaning intended.
They use GPS receivers on the bus, which calculates the position then transmits back using GPRS for central reporting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBus_(London)
I'm pretty sure Uber uses Google Maps in for a lot of it's mapping and navigation [1]. I'm not saying Uber adds no value - payment processing isn't easy, but it's not solving any new mapping problems that Google hasn't already solved. Its main innovation has been to ignore existing taxi laws by classifying itself as "ride-sharing".

[1] http://www.zdnet.com/article/uber-to-invest-500m-in-mapping-...
Habits That Help Code Quality
I honestly can't say for certain that I've ever intentionally clicked on an ad.
PluralNet: Pluralization for your .Net application
Did you read the article? In it, the author discusses the engineering issues that arise from trying to deal tackling problems in different languages. Now, granted, Uber in this particular thread of discussion does not have to deal with tokenization issues of Japanese/Chinese character search strings but I think it is naive to not think that the nuances of individual communities of 400+ cities intra-country, let alone dealing with separate nations, will add significant engineering overhead... (even if the relationship is not linear)
Vouchers do not work for things that you have to have, are only purchased from a limited number of suppliers, and there is no feedback mechanism in place.

Contrast my pickle story with another scenario: the local government announces that everybody must keep a jar of a certain kind of pickles at home. To facilitate that, vouchers will be provided to purchase these pickles from a vendor/distributor.

Can you imagine how that'd work out? I can. Pickles would soon be costing 100 bucks a jar. And they'd contain one pickle if you were lucky.
I went into CH at the Basel crossing twice this year in a car with GB plates, nobody was interested. Drove through Geneva several times too without being stopped.
Yes, but that applies only to very limited headless machines. As soon as you want to use graphics or peripherals hyper-v will not suffice.
Merge Conflicts.

I think a lot of tutorials spend a lot of time teaching you the index/staging (a non-trivial concept that beginners don't need) but don't teach you how to survive merge conflicts and other common tricky situations which beginners are likely to run into if they're collaborating.

Your list is all you need...until you try to `git pull` and it says

> Cannot pull with rebase: You have unstaged changes.

You're only option with your list is commit your changes, but I think it's better to `git stash` then `git pull` then `git stash pop`

Though when you `git pull` you can get a merge conflict and there's two different ways to resolve it depending on if you used the `--rebase` flag or not.

Once you're done resolving those conflicts, you run `git stash pop` and could possibly get yet-another merge conflict that needs to get resolved.

Basically, I'd add `git stash` to your collaborative list. You can't `git pull` without it.
100 Fun Things to Do Online When You’re Bored
A $400 robot baby you can stick in a backpack
Even today when startup resources abound, Sam's Startup Playbook [0] and the course How to Start a Startup [1] are in another league, particularly with their directness and clarity.

Edit: Getting downvoted, but these resources are really great, so I'm not sure what's going on. I just added links in case people are unfamiliar.

[0]: http://playbook.samaltman.com

[1]: http://startupclass.samaltman.com
I doubt Uber would have gotten started without leaning on Google for both mapping and directions. This benefited them both as Google incorporated Uber back into it's Maps product.
The idea that inequality goes up with growth and growth goes down with equality was cited without a shred of supporting evidence.

I presented two examples that indicated (although did not prove) that the opposite could happen.

How is that massively unfair exactly?

There might have been no competition for American manufacturing but that didn't automatically mean that the American middle class had to come into existence and be imbued with since unsurpassed spending power. If there were no Marshall Plan it's not like there would have been demand for American products and services either in spite of them being the sole manufacturing superpower - since other countries couldn't afford them.

The decisions that imbued the middle class with spending power and gave money to Europe/Japan that enabled them to buy American products were deliberate political decisions that led not only to greater levels of equality, but greater levels of growth through higher demand.
So somebody that takes 5 hours to complete a task that I can do in 1 should be paid the same?

Wouldn't this lead to people trying to take longer in completing tasks and making things seem "harder" than they are?
I'm in a similar position to you in regards to facebook. My strategy is to use custom CSS to remove the elements of the site that only serve to distract me (newsfeed, etc.). I still get notifications for events, chat, etc. so it works out alright.
Nick Bostrom's argument.
"I could do that in a weekend"

You could but you didn't so I can't use it...
There's a naïveté in saying "I could do that in a weekend" as a measure for employee bloat, but that's making a straw man of the question.

It is nearly always more probable that a large company with several hundred or more plus engineers doesn't need that many. That those engineers are there for other reasons -- political reasons or speculating on new products, valuation reasons, etc. -- than for the reason that those engineers are fundamental to the top or bottom line of the company's core product/s.

Uber does not need 2000 engineers. That's a prima facie fact.

I've worked inside several large companies and saw this first hand. Hundreds of engineers across teams doing "stuff", no doubt, but nothing that ultimately or ever tied to the top or bottom line. The only ideas that I could come up with for why these people were there were: perhaps the headcount helped company valuation, perhaps we needed that many benchwarmers for when there was company churn, maybe there is some political reasons a manager wants a sizeable headcount on their team, or maybe it's just leadership ignorance as to how things are getting delivered. But in no way could I see a concrete justification for many teams and many engineers.

What am I missing?
Except asking a bus driver to keep track of button pushing is distracting and could endanger the lives of the passengers or people outside. The stop needs to be announced 30-60 seconds before they arrive at the stop so then is driver is still actively driving. This is something the drivers union would be all over, it's not as straightforward as you assume.
After journeying through many languages since my long time with Java that ended in 2011 I have to say I have yet found a mock object framework in other languages that match the expressiveness that Mockito did. Python's mock has the least memorable API I have ever worked with. :-(
Zeppelin: a library for writing secure smart contracts on Ethereum
You're right! And that's why I'm still using it. It is a little slow, the OS is outdated, and the battery is on its way out. I'm not 20 anymore and I'm no longer interested in mucking about with hacking the phone, so Cyanogenmod isn't an option. Replacing the battery is an option, and I may do that, but I'd rather just save the hassle and upgrade... if anything worth upgrading to existed.
Google Pixel in White, Pixel XL in Black
But nobody wants that. They want conductors back. This is not a problem with a technological solution.
This line makes my day:
"Vick, I now make more than you do. What's your counter offer?"
Thats because that what it costs to get it up scratch. Taxes distribute the burden across everyone, and can be politically hard to get through.

Privatization puts the burden on the people who use it.
And that is not enough, as their wealth is higher than that 55%.
Compiler Explorer – now with side-by-side compiler comparison
There's a pretty good discussion about it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/MotoX/comments/4pabyq/my_moto_x_201...
I'm originally from the UK, but feel that 'healthy skepticism' there can all too often be the label that people give "why bother, it'll probably fail anyway". The boundless optimism of the US may be more beneficial in the long run.
I agree with everything you say, but that response, like the junior engineer, focusses on the technology. So give people six months not a weekend -- there's a good chance they still won't be Uber.

The success of many companies, and probably all of the unicorns, has nothing to do with technology. The tech is necessary, of course, but so are desks and an accounting department.

Internalizing that has been difficult for me as an engineer.
This and there is another reason why privatization creates inequality. It is a proven method for the oligarchs to rob public assets. First they put their friends as key figures of a public company. These people let the company rot, so its price on the market goes down. Then the oligarchs buy it at a ridiculously low price.

They even made it with an entire country: Russia. And this is why they ( the western backed oligarchs ) are screaming against Putin ( and the oligarchs backed by him ) since then.
You can certainly do it with an RPi - although you might have to keep rebooting it every hour or so. :)

GPS and 3G/4G are trivial add-ons. There are stacks for mobile data.

RFID doesn't have the reliable range, so that won't work as a solution.

It's not really a hard problem for a competent small engineering team with a mix of embedded hardware and software skills. It's not quite a trivial problem, because there are some interesting edge cases, mostly when a bus is diverted. But there is absolutely zero rocket science required.

You could hack something unreliable together in a weekend, but it would take up to six months to get all the bugs out, do the production engineering for a bullet-proof solution, standardise the installation process (if retrofitted), and so on.

Double that if management is poor. :)

Those last parts often get forgotten in software. Hacking something together that kind of works if you don't look at it with a visible frown is hobby coding, not engineering. Engineering is the boring work that happens after that, to build something with a quantifiable many-9s uptime that meets or exceeds a standard spec with comprehensive test cases.
If they've prepared a counter at $140, there's a decent chance they're (quietly) allowed to haggle up to some larger number, say between $145 and $160 depending on how much they want you and how much they expect you to negotiate.

They won't tell you what this higher number is under any normal circumstances, and may lie about it, but it probably exists.
Yes, Netflix is slowly turning from a library of old content into a network of new content. As a subscriber, I'm 100% okay with this and so glad I have the service. I'm not going anywhere else!

Will we continue talking about (and measuring) their dwindling library size forever? At what point do we accept that Netflix is offering different content than in the past?
I have found advertising online to be a full time job, one I'm not willing to perform, when development is also a full time job. I've gotten much better mileage out of attending meetups, getting to know people, and eventually doing talks.

I know you said you are bad at networking, but the market doesn't care. You'll have to choose: either waste your time for basically zero response advertising online, or learn how to get over or hide your personal issues long enough to make networking work.

I didn't used to like it, either. I have very strong opinions about modern corporate culture (emphasis on the "cult"), that it grates me raw to see so many other people aspire to such hell. I had to learn to just keep my mouth shut, avoid the instant gratification of telling someone they were wrong to avoid turning then off of me so I could focus on my long term goal of building my business.
That's awesome! Now I want that on my phone so i have a real tricorder. ;)

A random example of things you can get from there is the 3CAT-2 satellite which has a "magnetometer", "reflectometry" which includes targets like "altitude maps of the Earth, wind surface over the sea, deforestation..."

https://nanosatlab.upc.edu/en/missions-and-projects/3cat-2

The README file has more examples: https://github.com/daniestevez/gr-satellites

Pretty cool stuff, to think all that is all readable up there for anyone.
Agree that wechat and the like are going against the grain of the open nature of internet, but one positive side effect of wechat is that it will force many service and content to develop simple web apps instead of mobile apps, because it is the only way to exist there inside.

Most mobile apps need to die and be replaced by web apps, then wechat will die too, or become a mobile os, which is the same.
The battle between "new deal era problem solving" and "market based privatization" is a distraction from the actual reality that government comes up with all the plans, public or public/private, and corruption in both is widespread.

The only way we will improve upon the quality of solutions is to have a zero tolerance policy for corrupt officials, regardless of which "side" of this "battle" they claim to be passionate about.

Is it any surprise that in a country with significant government corruption such arrangements would also be corrupt? New Deal programs like Social Security have been raided by corrupt politicians, the PBGC is not actuarially sound, most of the military's budget is un-accounted for. This is corruption at the Trillion dollar scale and has nothing to do with the fake ideological war between public sector ideologues and free market ideologues.

There are several relevant layers, few of which are exposed to democratic or market pressure/discipline:

- Making the determination that a service is necessary

- Deciding on the characteristics of the service.

- Creating a playing field for private sector participants to compete

- Revising the requirements and playing field to keep quality and value high (democratic or market-based)

- Creating transparency requirements for firms and government agencies participating in public/private partnerships.

- Assessing the outcomes and reconsidering all of the above based on results.

In our system, each of these breaks down. I can't think of a single example that has succeeded in all of the above areas.

Notably, privatization has been used by officials to avoid transparency requirements in recent wars. Chances are this is a major objective of privatization schemes. Officials from both major political parties have set up privatized email servers recently to avoid transparency/accountability.
Sadly based on my experience with recruiters the majority of them make you all look bad.
> I have read comments on hacker news from people that worked directly under him, talking about how he forbid using object orientation in programming.

Steve Jobs talked incessantly about object-oriented programming after he left Apple, and built an entire company (NeXT) and operating system (NeXTStep) using a new object-oriented programming language (Objective-C). He didn't write the code himself but he funded and led these efforts.
Mozilla Reduces Threat of Export-Grade Crypto to Firefox
Good job Demian, I love the fact that you're also coming up with a solution!
Iyi günler
...though now that I ran fuzzer again, the results are pretty disappointing:

https://github.com/FLIF-hub/FLIF/issues/304
The George Plimpton Story
That's what the problem is. You can invent something in a weekend; the red tape takes longer. I think that still counts as "built in a weekend."
So this is not a non-profit? Smart. It should allow for more freedom. For instance, I noticed that they sell common business services as well and give a pretty hefty portion of it to non-profits. This seems to be a pretty popular thing, also known as creating a double bottom line. I’d like to see more businesses do things like this. More on double bottom lines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_bottom_line
I'd suggest writing horror.

"My coming to New York had been a mistake; for whereas I had looked for poignant wonder and inspiration ... I had found instead only a sense of horror and oppression which threatened to master, paralyze, and annihilate me" - HP Lovecraft

Seems like he had a positive experience from a similar venture.
>Joel Spolsky tried to set the record straight,

Joel Spolsky may have tried but his companies (Fog Creek, Stackexchange) are not big enough nor influential enough to convince the industry.

Microsoft in 1990s was one of the few companies that deliberately provided private offices with a door for every programmer. However, that ideology later morphed into putting 2 or more developers to share one room and then relocating a large group onto open floor plans[1]. It shows that even a company that originally prided itself on private offices eventually deviated towards open offices. (They still have lots of private offices.)

As a counterpoint to offices with doors, there was billionaire Gordon Moore (CEO Intel) in 1996 without a private office.[2]

The issue is that the touted benefits of private offices are not obvious slam dunks to observers. For example, if open floor plans with their distractions kill productivity, Google (open cubicles) should have lost to Microsoft Bing. Amazon and their AWS programmers distracted by open offices should be losing to Microsoft's Azure programmers. (Of course, there are multiple other factors at play besides office layout but that may also prove that open-vs-private doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things -- i.e. it's statistical noise.)

There are no slam dunk business case studies that definitively proves that private offices produce superior business results. The narrative for private offices needs spectacular headlines of success in Harvard Business Review or Techcrunch articles about YC companies with private offices defeating every competitor. So far, the proponents like Spolsky (not big enough) and Microsoft (not considered a trendsetter in the tech world) is not enough.

[1]http://www.geekwire.com/2014/microsoft-developer-division/

[2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sX5g0kidk3Y&feature=youtu.be...
Sounds like a Nokia Communicator series, but hard to say exactly what vintage (they existed between 1996 and 2007 after all).
This is available for public buses in NYC. The city added GPS to their buses and then the ability to query distance from current stop via SMS.

Then they opened their APIs, and now I have a half dozen apps to choose from that will show the approximate time until the next bus from a particular line will reach any given stop.

(Not always 100% accurate, but useful enough to know when to wait indoors for 5 min if it's raining, or pick another line/choose to walk because of delays.)
I don't know if that's actually a good thing. In general, I prefer native apps (real apps) to web apps; in particular, I trust an open-source application I compiled myself far more than I do some random website.

Unfortunately, I trust the random website more than I do a closed-source, 'free' mobile app.

So it's a bit of a pickle.

Long-long term, I'd like to see more free software on mobile devices, and more simple HTML web apps.
> I'd argue that a gift card to Amazon for pickles handed out is probably the easiest way. They don't get into the produce business, they don't get into the warehousing or distribution business, they just hand out gift cards. Somebody else -- who is really good at that other stuff, by the way, handles the rest.

I'd argue that if you did that, one hedge fund would buy up all of the pickle producers, fund a bunch of research saying that children needed at least 3 pickles a day, buy a bunch of lobbyists to insist that the government provide at least 20 pickles a week for each poor child (to allow them to compete fairly with their pickle-rich brethren), and then raise the price of pickles to $20 a piece.

Government cheese is the counterexample.

edit: explicitly; Government wants all people to have cheese. Government decides what qualities it wants that cheese to have, government goes to cheesemakers and asks for that cheese while figuring out how much it would cost to go into the cheesemaking itself. If any number of cheesemakers can provide cheese to the standard for less than the government can produce cheese, they are all given contracts to produce cheese. If they do not, the government produces cheese. The government gives cheese to people. Depending on how well cheese can be warehoused, government uses the timing of cheese purchases to support private cheesemaker production capacity when cheese market is weak.