skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "Would the monopoly plan really work?"

IMO no. Others mention the network effect, and while it will certainly be a factor, I don't think it will be anywhere near strong enough to make the monopoly plan work.

The network effect for Uber is really local - at the city level. An "Uber, but only in Austin" service can easily compete with a national-level Uber, since the vast majority of cab rides are taken within a user's home city.

You need a critical mass of cars/drivers to present real competition in this space, but you don't need to do it at national, or even state-level scale. A small upstart that can achieve critical mass in a single city can present real threat to Uber in that city.

The network effect of cabs between cities is so little that while a lot of consolidation of cab companies have occurred in each city, until Uber there was never a major cross-city network. I'm not convinced that a unified worldwide fleet has a significant competitive advantage. It'd be useful for tourists, maybe.

And this is already happening - Juno here in NYC is gaining real traction by charging drivers less, getting drivers to evangelize to each other. Uber won't be toppled by Lyft or any other megalithic ride hailing company, it will more likely be toppled by hundreds of smaller, geographically narrow companies.
I am glad that this article isn't saying "haha they beat tesla" in any way. Though I think they do miss out on one point in regards to Musk's "cleverness". The way that Musk commodified the electric car made everyone want one, much like the iPhone when it came out. Tesla car's spurred the EV revolution. Tesla's are appealing to many who want them and can afford them but what they have done is made clear that the EV (or 0 Emission Vehicle) is the vehicle of the future.

Tesla doesn't care that much if they get beat to market, in fact I would posit that the more EV's come to market before the Model 3 the better (for the world anyway). The iPhone was always an iPhone and many (not a majority) people have one, however over time all the other phone manufacturers decided to go with Android (as it was open source) and made their own phone, now they all fight for supremacy in the phone market. All the various androids have a way bigger market share than iPhones but the important thing is that we had a smart phone revolution. Most [read all] phones are smart phones these days and all cars will be electric cars soon.
As long as you know a lil bit of math and coding, you're good to go. If you're watching the cs231n videos and don't understand something, you can always check out their amazing class notes.

The cs231n course covers a lot of material, including some (or most) of the material from the Andrew Ng's Coursera course. You can totally do them in parallel though.
You're getting a rare down vote from me because this is such an obvious straw man. At least pretend to try to understand his point.
Why would a person think Powell would be seen as an alternative for a Republican. He burned his bridges. Strange thing is he could have ran and won at least the nomination before.
If taxis could survive there's no reason uber couldn't.
Yeah. There is a lot of routing/binding action going on in an engine when you get past the "hardcode everything for a single context" stage. I'm currently mixing about four big ideas together in my engine - they haven't all been deployed in the actual game project I have right now, but they're getting developed alongside what's there:

* Unix-esque hierarchical path routing - the addressing system I alluded to in parent comment. It's used as a mapping substrate - you can swap out parts of the route to quickly change what's being addressed, and it stores just a little bit of data so that leaf nodes mostly act as keys into other containers. I changed it from int-per-node to int-array-per-node today, which may or may not have been a great idea, but came up because it was irritating to have to make a special store for string keys.

* Micro-database system for allocating various types of engine data. This is the biggest source of friction in the engine right now - each data type has a custom container, and in theory, when allocated it'll automatically map to a path address. Engine scenes are currently loaded up through a script saying "allocate these things, relate these things together", but the addressing isn't present, you just access the containers more-or-less directly(ad-hoc per container).

* J. Paul Morrison-style "classic FBP" to compile data graphs. This is more of a "I want to program with Lego Bricks" kind of goal - it's the most directly interesting one for the keybinding problem, and it's used in existing engines for aspects of rendering graphics and sound. But it ultimately depends on having the addressing system functioning on real assets, so it's on the backburner.

* A "stack of small compilers" as in the VPRI STEPS project. This is used to turn game design assets(event scripts etc.) into runtime data by way of a behavior tree compiler that emits opcodes for a small VM interpreter. This is the stuff I'm really using the most, right now, and it actually inspired the addressing system, as compiling all that stuff created a need for it.
My ideal app for this is decades out. It's augmented reality based.

Something like Google Glass, scanning in real-time the food at a grocery store, identifying it (deep learning), and finding you recipes.
I'm not sure that Americans do hate hatchbacks. The Ford Focus is so incredibly common everywhere I go. VW Golfs are common, too. I see quite a few Sparks in the city.

Plus like another comment said, many crossovers are just tall hatchbacks too. Subaru Outback, Ford Escape, Nissan Rogue, Toyota Rav4, taken to the extreme with the Buick Encore/Chevy Trax.
I think you've highlighted the answer there - that working with shared memory is easy to mess up and that immutability and message passing both provide some attractive aspects. The thing is, not every problem is solvable (and to a much larger extent, optimizable) without some concept of concurrency and all of the problems of mutual access that come along with it. I don't think the mutual exclusion problem is typically that bad with modern java - profilers let you visualize your locking issues, atomic variables let you squeeze cycles and really the correctness problem is not that hard, it's the performance optimization problem. I would rather my problems be explicit and in front of my face than hidden in some detail about event loops, method invocation time impacting other method invocations and so forth. The other important point is that as soon as you get into working in a clustered environment, you start having to think about distributed locks and concurrency when there is not even a shared clock to rationalize things. So, for product oriented engineers, great go use nodejs and you can write JS on the front end and the back end and it will be absolutely tremendous guys, I am telling you :) If we want to talk about judging languages on technical features (as this article starts the ball rolling on) then we can't just bandaid real problems with easily approachable solutions and write off any actual complexity as out of scope.
I've been using GoAccess for a year now as a traffic analysis tool on my blog. It's been great. Easy to use, and great for real-time analysis using the command-line interface.
I simply do not agree with you.
Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac
Phil Ivey ordered to repay millions to casino over ‘edge sorting’ scandal
Reckless and non-viable in much of the world. Nobody is going to get an autonomous car working in a winter climate for a long time. Lines on the road can't be seen, there are potholes, driving through deep piles of snow are common, communicating with other drivers and accomidating and anticipating their actions in snow narrowed streets is necessary....

There are plenty of times of year where I'd be wary trusting a human driver from the bay area in a Minneapolis snow storm much less a computer designed by them. I can see how it would be easy not being able to imagine difficult road conditions when you spend your whole life in a place where the worst weather is a tiny bit of rain.

Multiple instances of running red lights right when they start testing? To me that says driverless cars are decades away and some people are so optimistic that they aren't going to see it before there are several tragedies and driverless cars are legislated away.

There are lots of very common driving mistakes that are orders of magnitude more common than stopping for a red light.
This hits the nail on the head with respect to the monopoly argument. There is plenty of room for other companies to enter the market is Uber jacks up prices.
It's really the automatic aggregation and query-able database that is an issue, not the data itself. Like, it doesn't really matter if I'm seen walking into an adult store. It does matter if someone can look up the names, addresses, and employers of everyone who walked into an adult store. Or if someone could make a list of everywhere I've been photographed going in the last year and construct narratives based off of that.

Getting that sort of information about people and places needs to be expensive in order to protect people from casual violation of their privacy.
In the past, a utility did the determination and remapping via off-disk software.

My understanding was the traditional "bad block" behavior was actually hidden - there are bad blocks that occur but the firmware silently remaps everything.

When you see a bad block at the level you can see via e.g. smartctl program, that means the space set aside for bad block remapping is full - the drive has already been silently failing for a while now.
I'm not sure that I understand your point right now.

With 300-500 cycles at 100% utilization, a 300 mile car would have degraded its battery to 70% after 90,000 - 150,000 miles. With 2,000-2,500 cycles of 25%, the car would have traveled 150,000 to 187,500 cycles.

That seems like a significant improvement to me?

Your point about supercharging is similarly valid, but also a little misleading. The big factor there is temperature and the Tesla packs use active cooling to reduce the hit from more aggressive charging. I'm not sure that anyone has really seen a significant impact from this.

Basically, battery quality and management matter. Tesla does those things pretty well.
>If you've ever driven a manual car it's totally intuitive.

If you're talking about Americans, that number is going to be much, much lower than you'd think. Very few Americans have ever even seen a manual transmission.
If you haven't, check out org mode in emacs. It can also inline graphs easily. With ready to go bindings for Python, graphviz, gnuplot, and R. (C-c C-x C-v will show charts inline with default bindings.)

My favorite is grabbing logs with a shell block. Reshaping with elisp or Python, and then charting with gnuplot. All in one file with an iterative workflow.
I don't get the value of composability and refuse to learn, and "monad" and "laws" sound like math which I don't want to understand. So instead of attempting to comprehend what this is about I'm just going to make fun of you in a comment.
> Public workers don't settle for less pay than private sector workers

That's...Complicated. In unskilled labor and skilled trades positions, it's often the case that public salaries are competitive, or at least that total compensation (including benefits) is.

In most general analytical/management positions, it's not close, public employees get paid far less.

In IT and some other fields the gap is even greater.
We don't have a popular vote. We have a state vote.

I find it odd that you don't think the people voting for Trump (or for that matter Clinton) were voting their conscience.
What I love about Uber is that I can use the same service pretty much everywhere I travel. I don't see them dying anytime soon. They have huge mind share at the moment and are better funded than any competitor. At a minimum Uber can pivot into being a front-end for these other players, providing a unified booking and payment experience.
And then once they have these controls into place, just defund the office that gives you the key to unlock the filter.
As an easterner, let me offer a little bit of a different view. This will likely get down voted to hell but let's see how tolerant HN really is. ;-)

My advice: get married. Find a match maker or a professional match match making service. You're 31. I don't know what point in the West (and now more in the east as well) it became normal to be unmarried in your 30s but it's really unhealthy from a mental health point of view. At this rate you're likely to get married in your late 30s (which isn't bad but it isn't for everyone I think). So my advice is get serious and get married ASAP
Beware of Shaming Other Developers
How to Unsubscribe, even when you can't
It was my first ride, so it was probably an anti-fraud measure. Still, a simple notification like "we will be charging you $25 to verify your card" would have been great.

Interestingly, I use Uber semi-regularly, and they don't hold anything. They probably only did it for the first ride.
This Is by Far the Collest Design Work on Porsche
So they settled on a giant rock with dinner plates at each corner.
The key part is "...has a dangerous probability of creating a monopoly for the discounting firm".

That's not the case here. I don't see Uber creating a monopoly in any way. If they raise prices to unreasonable levels (i.e., more than people used to pay for regular cabs), people will go to Lyft, Juno, or the next ride-hailing startup. If there's no competitor remaining, new ones will show up. Or regular cabs will be back.

IMO, the endgame for Uber is not to raise prices; it is to reduce costs. They're betting the farm on driverless cars.

Not too different than Amazon with retail. Amazon doesn't need to charge more than the local retailers they've put out of business; they just need to have a lower cost structure.
I can't think of any comments 'Dead' because of disagreement.

I've seen feedback from users that they feel that this is exactly why a comment was down-voted, whether it gets killed or not. I admit I don't have any dead comments at hand, and I don't think the search API returns dead comments. Granting the anecdatum, here's one that I came across:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13190877
what you describe is the common sense absolutely everyone have.

but it means little when dealing with crazy.
I too am happy threats and personal appeals didn't work. An elector needs to represent the rules of the election for their state absolutely. Some states give discretion and some don't.
>Amazon literally has none, no mobile and no desktops/laptops/tablets.

Amazon has Kindle Fire tablets[0], [1]; these have Alexa built-in.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B018SZT3BK/ref=twister_B01BRWH8G8?...

[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0189XYY0Q/ref=fs_ods_fs_tab_ts
I also eat an athlete's diet and when I lived in the US it was very expensive. Going to farmer's markets helps a lot, where I would buy cauliflower, sweet potatoes, beets, kale, carrots, squash, eggplant, and more.

Since I try to get around 60% of my caloric intake from fat and protein, that's where most of the expense came from. For fat, there are a small number of fruits like avocados, durian, and coconuts and those tend to be more expensive / hard to find, most nuts are expensive, cow's milk isn't very healthy and never sat well with me before exercise, but the best and cheapest option is probably to just included some healthy oil in your cooking. For protein, chicken is good and not too pricey, fish is good but expensive, red meat should be avoided above all, legumes are cheap and great tasting if prepared well, tofu and eggs are cheap and high in protein but it's typically recommended to not consume them in large quantities, coagulated cow's blood is awesome but good luck finding it outside of Asia!

I stand firmly on the side that it is expensive to eat truly healthy food, especially if you live in a food desert, and especially if you have specific nutritional requirements like that of an athlete. Plus, a huge factor is that to eat cheaply, you have to cook, and as the HN crowd should know, time is money. The time preparing, cleaning up, buying food, and actually learning how to cook is significant but worth it.
Hey jayjay71 - thanks for your comments - let me clarify some of your questions!

Our core customers are actually experienced engineers, but our publicly exposed product (CAD Add-in, site, etc.) isn't the offering where we're currently making most of our revenue, but in Q1 it will be. We'll announce the specifics publicly, so stay tuned. I suspect you'll be happy with what this has. Unless you have a exotic needs, we'll be able to make it.

We essentially decided that it's more important to satisfy our early enterprise customers using a lot of hand-selling until the CAD Add-in is fully there - which is the slow part because the computational geometry is quite tricky to get the experience you want for instant quotes / feedback that are meaningful.

We are NOT building this to flip. There are far easier companies to start if you're looking to make a quick buck, and Founders Fund / Lux don't invest in companies with a small vision. We haven't talked a lot publicly about our long-term vision, but it's a core piece of our DNA.

Happy to answer more questions.
Here's an example you can try on any Linux System running procfs.

https://gist.github.com/amorphid/4a65741d14db38b96341d7e1f2d...

The short version is I'm passing a variable in via the pid's standard in, reading the line, and then declaring the variable. This is a very contrived example :) But you can write a wrapper script that would handle all of the line reading for you.

This originally came up when I was asking someone how to pass sensitive information (API keys, passwords, etc.). I did some research, and found this approach.

In most programming languages, for basic system calls, you basically just call a command, that command runs, and then exits. But sometimes you want a script that can take information from standard in, or send it to you from standard out. Like you may write a script that runs for a few minutes, then says "OK, I'm ready for the password!", and then you pass it in at the time it's needed (but honestly, don't do it unless you need to, because it's one more thing that can break.

Erlang/Elixir land have a library called erlexec that does this => http://saleyn.github.io/erlexec/

Another Elixir library is Porcelain => https://github.com/alco/porcelain
How to sleep
No, you don't understand. He's one of the guys who can make Twitter in a weekend.
Ah, so if I try this, it won't count because it's No True Icecream.

On the other hand, I commend you on being completely consistent and somehow going through with this conversation without a hint of sarcasm, snark or anything other than a deep passion for the subject. More than I can say for myself. But I'll still hold this as perhaps the most surreal exchange I've ever had and can't quite remove the feeling that this was a masterfully executed joke.
How will self-driving cars handle the snow?
Because frameworks come and go. The important thing are the abstract concepts

At that level, they assume you are pretty smart and capable of figuring out something like an API on your own time as needed. They'd rather you know what all these funky things in these APIs are doing at a core level so that you can employ them in an effective manner.
The question is whether they will just be able to sit back and take in the billions one day.

I have always looked forward to self-driving car networks because of what I perceived to be their ultra-competitive and ultra-low margin nature.

Then two years ago everyone started talking about an Uber monopoly and I got super upset. Are we seriously seeing another industry ultra centralize due to technology?

But I'm beginning to suspect that this may be a massive miscalculation on the part of Uber and its investors. Maybe it is a low margin, highly competitive industry and Uber will be remembered as that one company that subsidized everybody's rides for a few years until it just faded into the background.
no script is the only realistic option on mobile though :(
In my experience, post-2000 engines are pretty reliable too. I have a 03 Honda Pilot with 225k miles and an 05 Odyessy with 130k.

No real issues with engines other than maintenance. I think I had a bad EGR valve on the Pilot 10 years ago. Know what breaks? Electronic crap. Doorlock servos ($400), side door motors and rails ($800), various little modules, AC sensors, airbag crap not covered by recall, defective key cylinders, etc.
And really they are SI units, the 'International System of Units', which may or may not 'privilege' them, but is certainly both correct and normal usage.
BlackBerry to open autonomous vehicle hub
> 3. Evade local regulations

Could you share some specific information to substantiate this?

I frequently hear this statement on Hacker News, and (as far as I can recall), every time I've asked for a source or evidence for the claim, I have not gotten a satisfactory answer.

Black car services where you arrange pickup with a specific driver ahead of time have always been regulated differently than taxis. Uber has cars that operate as taxis, and they're properly licensed.
Alibaba Lawsuit Throws the Spotlight on Fake Reviews
> They can sit back any day and rake in billions

I don't know if this is accurate. They're fending off lawsuits pushing them to recognize their drivers as employees, their prices are artificially low (in the sense that it's subsidized by VC money), and they're racing both cab companies and car companies at once (if Tesla/GM/Ford gets autonomous cars first, who needs Uber?).

At a ~$70B valuation, they have no margin for error. Their only realistic positive option at this point is to IPO. Right now, they're valued higher than Ford ($50B), GM ($55B) and Tesla ($33B), and currently Uber is reliant upon them (and others) to manufacture the cars they rent to people; if they are beaten to autonomous cars, they have no reason to exist.

This is why I think Uber is in a tough spot; they've raised a ton of money at an enormous valuation, and have to somehow convince the public markets that they're worth it. Whether they can do it, who knows? I've been wrong on these things before (Zynga and KING seemed like obvious flops, but the public bought into them).
He didn't acknowledge that Apple waits years and years to update its machines.
and completely abandoned.
Matchmaker, find me a grant
> I have always looked forward to self-driving car networks

As great as that would be, those are still a decade away from common use, probably much more.
Rather Dude-like wisdom, my chapeau off to you, sir
I'm sure they are.. the real question is will there ever be upgradeability again, and how fast will spells between refreshes be?