skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For 1 & 2: when was that as for the last 1.5 years at least they use Baidu and it works fine. 3 yes indeed, very annoying. 4. In the west support is good: from China they just do not respond unless a driver screwed me on purpose (doing the ride without me in the car which happened a few time): I would receive no mail but the amount paid would be set to 0 rmb. 5. Even most car brand names are in Chinese now it seems.

What we find most annoying that I always set pick up as an intersection of two streets (fuxing/wulumuqi but in Chinese) and then stand on the corner and yet they always call to ask where we are. We are on the f*cking corner I entered and we do not speak Chinese very well so a mumbling guy does not work well. They stopped allowing you to send sms to the driver, like you can in other countries which would allow to send google offline translated details... so often they just cancel the ride because we cannot explain. Uber Black still do their best so usually that is the easiest.

Last year things were definitely easier. Drivers were doing their best more for foreigners, you could sms and they would not call before, they would just pick you up.

A big pet peeve is with Google and maybe someone here knows how to fix it; I use Google Translate with offline translations but when you are online, even though Google cannot be reached, it will try to do it online. It is beyond annoying when you quickly want to translate something, you have offline installed and yet it will just hang trying to reach the mothership...

Edit: now that I have access to Google to search for my Translate issue, I will give Netguard a go.
Simulating a biased coin with a fair one (2015)
I had a bunch of floppies in a box fail in a peculiar manner according to the Fibonacci sequence. Luckily the important stuff was clustered in the back.
Doomocracy
He retired from Y Combinator last year. He is no longer a moderator here.
sure, but in hindsight would have been a better business move
We’re trying to stop bad mosquitoes by raising and releasing good ones
Luckey's political controvery makes an appearance.. in the byline... as the reason for the price hikes.

> Bankrolling Trump trolls costs a lot, yo

Regardless of what's right, that certainly feels like it's taken a side.
Oh yes they can!

I have met absolutely incompetent business owners who just happened to stumble into goldmines and through their own incompetence have locked in customers.

Start looking at software for an unsavoury infrastructure industry and you'll find this stuff abounds. Particularly in industries that were early adopters of computerized databases.
Apparently not, otherwise they would have used the locally produced. But they didn't, they chose the freebie SV tools.
I guess the alternative is to not try, put all your resources into making Aphyr cultists happy and then going out of business a few months later.

Built on top of existing cloud architecture and with a few experienced developers a cloud service can be made available in months. mLab didn't take years to build it and get it right, for instance. And those folks were a tiny operation years ago when they started. I'm not discounting the effort but I've been around that effort and have seen DB-As-A-Service go live with a couple smart people in a matter of months. AWS API's, containers, Zookeeper and come Python and you're well on your way. Again - it's hard but so is making a DB of Rethink's quality. It can be done, however. You start small and you go from there. You exploit your advantages as you build a fantastic product over time.

I'm not saying a SAAS would have saved them as I'm pretty sure their biggest issue is adoption in the first place.

But there's something to be said about your business plan when someone hosting your software is doing well why you, the owner, has to find a new job.
Apple price increases (1988)
> Instead of learning from that mistake, systemd just doubles-down on it.

Well, I was actually talking about future successors. What systemd did right and wrong at a technical level, as well as at a marketing, design and adoption level, will obviously have been internalized to a greater or lesser degree depending on the aspect being considered and the person doing the consideration.

> systemd will be much harder than SysV to replace because it includes more than SysV stuff.

I don't think so. There are a plethora of other init systems that have either been started in response, and people work out how to get those into these different distributions. The market for init systems is more vibrant than it ever has been, so any eventual successor gets to reap the benefits of everyone's collective experience in this area. Systemd may be overtaking most the large distributions, but let's not pretend the init system in linux, what it interacts with, and what's required to replace some or all of one init system with another aren't far better understood than they were a decade ago.

> why not just make it easy to replace if it needs to?

It may not be easy to replace, but it's far from impossible, and it's getting easier and better understood all the time because of people that don't want to run systemd. That's a good thing.

> Sure, but why not do that now? instead of pushing it off for people in the future to figure out?

Because regardless of how much it seems like people dislike systemd, I'm confident the majority of people either didn't notice, don't care, or like the new features enough to outweigh their dislike of other aspects. I would be happy to consider data that points to an alternate conclusion, but there's a reason why it's taking over, even if there are problematic aspects.
Here is the real problem. Incandescent bulb tech has been capable of being far more long-lasting, and therefore cheaper, since nearly the beginning. [1] The entire industry has been based on a kind of lie.

We are very fortunate that the LED industry has not been tainted by this mindset, and really most modern tech hasn't.

[1] http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/history/the-great-lightbu...
Exactaly. It would have given them a chance. Some runway. The alternative is obviously to go out of business.
I regret to inform you that Noto is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, which is FSF-approved, and essentially ensures that it will be available to all in perpetuity.

http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=...
Okay, tra la la. But can we all take note that the volume is PI, and that PI's decimal places are also infinite.

In this moment, I take issue with the idea that PI represents a "finite" volume.

PI, is more accurately a "known-volume-other-than-infinity."

Meanwhile, angels dance upon the head of a pin somewhere.
That example does not validate your point because it supports multiple hypotheses, including my hypothesis that Google is only interested in improving things which generate sufficient profit.

That's not your '"everything"' but my '"everything", except where it doesn't.'

In other words, they pick and choose.

FWIW, I also have inventive to make everything better, because I want the world to be a better place. But I too must pick and choose.
I feel like this data would be fairly specific to different manufacturers and models. I agree though, looking at raw smart results can be a bit meaningless without context.
It's crucial because people can die. That is not something you can say with someone's code being written this exact second. There is always time to research, test, experiment, and change.
>This strikes me as a matter of semantics; does it really matter if I'm targeted whether they hacked my account or hacked Google?

I think is incredibly important. If your information is put at risk due to bad practices by Google/Yahoo/Apple/Facebook/whomever that's a problem to be taken up with the company. If you use insecure passwords and someone is able to access your information that way, then the problem is with your passwords, not with the platform.

>Think harder. Who has the root access to the servers holding the data?

As far as I'm aware, no one. Like I said, from my experience, accessing personal data and user information as an engineer required a lot of red tape and approval from 'the powers that be', and violating those rules would get you fired faster than anything else.

>Could the existing infrastructure and data segregation ever change? How many external checks and balances are in play that can't be manipulated by internal forces (i.e. is there anything stopping Google, or holding Google accountable if their data protection policies change)?

Here I agree with you, probably not (or very little). They obviously have public privacy policies, but you have no proof that they abide by those, and I don't know (and doubt that) they get audited or whatnot to make sure that those policies are followed. Which is why being an employee made me more comfortable. If nothing else, it meant I'd know ;)
Do you know a project where such licensing scheme is used as an acceptable practice? As to be honest, it looks counter productive against GPL ideas.
I don't really see the long term problem. When light bulbs truly stop needing to be replaced, they will stop being _replaceable_. The market that will disappear is the light socket market. Consumers will buy a lamp with a permanently wired in LED and when they get tired of the way the lamp looks, they'll replace it along with the LED in it. This is already happening in wall and ceiling fixtures.
You may want to also look for an article by N. David Mermin "Is the moon there when nobody looks"
If you do not know the complexity class of the bubble sort then you probably do not a have formal CS education.

No, it means you're smart and have learned to sift out unimportant matters of detail ("Was bubble sort, which I only ever had to think about for a week or two the first half of my sophomore algorithms class, and was only ever brought up as a negative example anyway, O(n^2) or O(n^3)?") in order to focus on much more interesting and useful stuff.
How do you know they don't exist? Surely they're a person consisting of two gamete cells, which happen to be in different places?
It doesn't have to be that way. Certain approaches like "hire a bunch of consultants" or "buy more security products" or "hire smarter people and tell them to be really careful" aren't going to fix the fundamental problems. I see two main issues, one technical and one economic.

The technical problem is that we should be ruthlessly eradicating undefined behavior at all levels of our hardware and software stacks, and to the extent possible constructing applications out of building blocks that are very difficult to misuse. Among other things, this means not writing software in C or C++, which is a hard sell to a lot of people (especially if they're writing operating systems).

The economic problem is that it's nearly impossible for a customer to know whether a product is secure or not. If secure products are more expensive to produce than insecure products and customers are not willing to pay more for secure products, the result is that insecure products will be more successful. (See George Ackerloff, The Market for Lemons.)
> This depends a lot on the user. In the right hands it's extremely efficient.

IMO the inefficiency is more due to the fundamental brokenness of the Unix process model. A Unix process is sort of like a VM with none of the security, and all of the stuff that has been added to it over the years (signals, IPC, dynamic linking) just makes it worse and worse. Things like full machine virtualization and now over the past 15 years namespaces/cgroups/containers are very complicated, brittle ways of trying to work around the shortcomings of Unix processes. This IMO is the biggest advance plan9 made over Unix.
In hindsight, it would have caused this news to happen in 2014, not 2016.
I'm not sure why you wouldn't use smartd, which has sane defaults, can immediately alert based on arbitrary smart properties changing, and also handles scheduling smart tests. An arbitrary command can be run instead of sending email.

For example, reallocated sectors are not alerted on by default, so we added '-R 5!' to our smartd config. The full config we have is:

DEVICESCAN -a -s (L/../../6/01) -l selftest -l error -m <email> -M daily -M test -R 5!
Code Tree Browsing in Bitbucket Server with GitSense
Uber's problems extend far beyond China. While the app is nice, its the cheap fares that bring the vast majority of users to Uber, vs competitors or plain ol' taxis.

Those cheap fares are artificially low, funded by SV money and ignoring regulatory issues. But money does run out (or investors want a real return eventually), and regulators either change the law (nullifying their advantage) or crackdown completely.

Uber's network effects are almost non-existant. Every small geographic market has to be fought and won the hard, and expensive way. And when the money runs out and the fares go up, there is no market lock-in. Barriers to entry are low, potential competitors include anyone with a car, Uber just doesn't have a way to lock in market dominance.

Which is probably why they're rushing toward driverless vehicles as fast as they possibly can. Their own staff are an existential threat so they have to remove them as soon as possible. Except that puts them in direct competition with a whole range of extremely well funded, and well connected industry players.

So. Good luck Uber, this is just an example writ large of where Uber is heading in the not to distant future.
One of the problems with modern police politics is that there is basically no way for occupied populations to actually purge their corrupt police.

Time was, theoretically, you could at least mobilize to throw the bastards out (see the Battle of Athens) within reason and let the community heal itself.

Nowadays, though, the militarization of police and the desire of the .gov to crackdown on that sort of thing helps create this sorts of festering pockets of corruption that cannot be replaced because to do so is highly illegal.

(On a related note, this is part of the reason a great many people are reluctant to disarm or to accept legislation that would put them further at the mercy of police.)
Wal-Mart... sure, easy to see how Amazon and others will replace them. High-volume, low-cost means low-quality. And over time that's just a race to the bottom.

Apple... we all somehow want Apple without Steve Jobs to fail, and it's true they have lost a bit of their shine. 506 days and counting since a new MBP was released, no real "must-have" features on the iPhone or iPad in a while, and the feeling that software updates now come with more bugs. Sure.

But on the flip side of that... my MBP from 3 years ago is still a better laptop than any plastic shit Dell laptop that comes out. The screen is better, battery life is better, design is just better. And there's a better warranty (so I can get my 3 year-old battery replaced just by walking into a pretty space-ship store).

The products Apple builds hold up. Jony Ive and Tim Cook aren't Steve Jobs, but they're really great at what they do. I'm not out there shopping for a new Windows laptop, I'm just annoyed Apple hasn't come out with a new one yet.
> If you do not know the complexity class of the bubble sort

not knowing or remembering doesn't preclude one from understanding that one approach or technique can be more (or less) costly than another.
I haven't received a formal education in CS, and I know about CAP and what it means.

Reading the Aphyr "Jepsen" series is what helped me learn it... when I was still in high school. And this was necessary because I was curious about which database I needed to use for a particular side project I was writing.

It's totally possible to just Google "bubble sort complexity" or "CAP" and learn about it.
In a salary-negotiation-banned situation, are you also typically prohibited from exchanging salary for vacation, while maintaining the same perceived total compensation?
Or - considerably more likely - they could have created a significantly less successful Uber clone, like many engineers and entrepreneurs have managed in other countries where Uber operates. I mean, if it were that easy to come up with revolutionary new business models that the entire world needs, we wouldn't see quite so many cookie cutter startups in Silicon Valley either...

Actually, the more plausible arguments against protectionism and state aid for favoured corporations are the precise opposite to the one you're making: it's good for consumers to have a wider choice of ride-booking apps, and not a choice guided by the government. If the ridesharing apps are likely to tend towards being a monopoly anyway then there certainly are advantages to having it a locally owned and run one.
Life After Android: The Battle of the Platforms Heats Up
There's a reason why I've put in commercial-grade LED fixtures in my kitchen and garage. I'm willing to pay a premium for something that'll possibly last the next 20+ years with how few hours a day I use it.

Unfortunately most of those products don't really fit the decor of the rest of the house.
Can having ~2.9 replicas be approximated by using an error-correcting code across a large enough number of drives? Isn't that how RAID 5/6/Z work?
If they were anything like the other OS infrastructure software companies I've been around then consulting at this stage was the last thing their investors wanted this business to be. Consulting is not a business model you invest in. Anymore than 15-20% of revenue from the consulting practice is a business model that does not scale or have high margins and is not worthy of much valuation.

Consulting makes sense when your software business is driving and you're looking for a bit of fat around the edges. Look at RHT's 10-Q's, for instance.
> I don't have a security fatigue, but I sure have 'privacy fatigue'.

Exactly, it would be good if there was some relevant research about the how perception of privacy issues influences users behaviour, in relation to businesses (e.g. Google, Facebook) and state actors (governments).

The linked article explains that security fatigue has a cost on the economy; maybe if there was a similar conclusion about "privacy fatigue", that could lead to a healthy debate and, ultimately, (I know, I'm dreaming here) better privacy laws.
> extremist

This is the problem I'm talking about. HN should be above political discussions like this. Look, I'm sure we'd have a great exchange on politics; but this should be neutral grounds for all of us.

One of the things that makes HN great is that we're united by our passion for technology and if politics ever surfaces it should be because it has a direct impact on technology (like when Brendan Eich left Mozilla).
Some people have not given up. Home broadband now exceeds yesteryear expensive symmetric T1 lines. Cheap virtualization-capable small server hardware (Dell T20, Lenovo TS140) + free hypervisors allow self-hosting of OSS services which can replace/supplement commercial vendors and perform network filtering and DPI/IDS to reduce tracking.

A pfSense VPN VM can make self-hosted services and filtering available to mobile devices and laptops. After turning off iCloud and other settings, iOS is reasonably respectful of user policy and informed consent. A one-time admin cost per year (iOS major version lifetime).
It would be interesting to see how much twitters war against feelings and words is effecting their bottom line.
Which should be seen as an advantage, right? I'm guessing their employees and founders who are left with little to nothing would have been better off not squandering the last 2 years of their professional lives.

Fail fast, right?
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The US government banned Huawei for many reasons.

One of the reasons that should hit home to the HN crowd is that Huawei simply up and 100% cloned some of the highest-end Cisco routers in their early days.

While I'm no fan of patents, when you clone something down to the bugs (which is how Cisco demonstrated the cloning) you deserve to get some penalty.
The campaigns to save the rainforest did a lot of good. Deforestation slowed dramatically, although it is still a problem.

29000 km^2 lost in 1995 -> 6000 km^2 lost in 2015

http://rainforests.mongabay.com/amazon/deforestation_calcula...
I think LED opens the possibility for more custom lighting. If the lights are going to last over 20 years (or possibly longer with higher quality), why not do a custom lighting design for your bathroom or kitchen? You don't need to be limited to standard shapes of globes, tubes, circles, and A-lines, you want a wavy design or a varying radius, that's great. It will live until your next remodel when you can have a new custom lighting design.
So, states change without physical objects changing position. Meanwhile we pitiful humans, have a hard time distinguishing the objects that exchange states.

...and can someone tell me where the actual time comes into play?

Sure, one can say it is "something not unlike" the manipulation of time, and yet... somehow... it seems like we're just deciding to call it something it is not, since it certainly seems similar enough.

If I carve a piece of wood, such that it resembles a gun, it can play the part of a gun, but only until a person with an actual gun challenges me to a duel.
Pop quiz style is much better than asking a single question and then diving deep into it.

The most important part is that the candidate can say "pass" and that you don't force them to squeeze out a shitty answer.

There is simply no better way to find out the breadth of someone's knowledge than to quiz them over a broad range of things. Think about it: this is exactly what engineers do with each other naturally and in a fun way over time.

"Hey, do you know about X?"

Compare this with Google's idiotic idea of asking a single question and judging the candidate on that randomly selected question.

No one who knows their stuff will fail to answer a long list of pop quiz questions well...but anyone of any skill level might not know the answer to any particular question.
Because interviewers are more likely to be condescending to someone they don't respect, and many of them don't respect women.

Yes, this stuff happens to many people, not just women. But it happens to them on an alarmingly regular basis.
That isnt stopping them from trying.
I was my understanding that it was a mainly used as a means of verifying that User-A on website One is the same person as User-A on website Two. In other words, I thought it was being used to prevent impersonation.
I don't know. I'm not a CL user. I understand that they actually do have a type system, which can be used to verify that your inputs are of the correct type and match your assumptions. As for contracts, I wouldn't be surprised if someone wrote a macro for it: they're not exactly rocket science, at their simplest.

Don't ask me: I'm using Chicken Scheme, which provides both (to an extent: The documentation is worryingly vague about how the type system handles failure).
It would make more sense if they were just graded on number of pieces, considering it's a story not something that actually happened, they should just correct it.
> 10 Mbyte. Today Lisp runs fine on an modern processor and some people tinker with Lisp-based operating systems, again.

My main desktop machine has 16 GB RAM, and its processor cycle speed is probably also 1600 times as much as that of a machine from back then. Why can't I get my computer to perform 1600 times as much concurrent work as back then?

> Every iPhone does that now, since Apple's Objective-C and the iOS frameworks are actually that: efficient dynamic allocation, of runtime-typed small and large objects.

That's a luxury that we can nowadays afford. Even the cheapest entry-level smartphone is ridiculously more powerful than an 80's era workstation. But the amount of work computers do for us hasn't grown proportionally to the amount of computing power.
What is even more troubling is the amount of people who seem to believe that such people do not deserve a decent pay.