skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you really understand context, a lot of the time you don't need voice at all.

Consider a voice operated light switch. Why do I need to tell the switch I want the lights to turn on when I enter I room? The house AI should know the ambient light level, the time of day, my location in the house, and my default lighting preferences, and lighting should "just work" unless I want to change something - which is when I can ask for it.

Alexa can't do any of this yet. I can give Alexa commands to turn lights on or off, but currently there isn't even a context for the current light state. So I can't say "Alexa, lights" and have Alexa work out whether that means "turn the lights on" or "turn the lights off" for the room I'm in.

IFFT may eventually be able to do this, but it's far from transparent and straightforward.

It's about affordances. I have a reasonable idea what a human's affordances are. The current voice UI (vUI?) equivalent is a handful of dots of implemented functionality surrounded by huge areas of not-working-yet space.

Not only is there no map, there's no way to guess what might be on the map.

It's also about cognitive load. I'm typing this in a bedroom with a couple of 433MHz switches controlled by a remote - one for a light, one for a heater.

Using the remote takes no conscious load at all. When I had the switches controlled by Alexa, formulating a command took effort.
> Specifically they don't subtract R&D costs from their margins.

R&D costs should not be subtracted in order to calculate gross margin. They are a part of net margin only. Payroll is not part of gross margin either.

Here's a source: http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/122314/what-differen...
The gig economy is going to be terrible for society, everyone is a couple of bad reviews away from the street.
From the same FTC page:

Pricing below your own costs is also not a violation of the law unless it is part of a strategy to eliminate competitors, and when that strategy has a dangerous probability of creating a monopoly for the discounting firm so that it can raise prices far into the future and recoup its losses. In markets with a large number of sellers, such as gasoline retailing, it is unlikely that one company could price below cost long enough to drive out a significant number of rivals and attain a dominant position
I don't know about the details of modern maidsafe operation, but when I went to a talk by them a few years back at a Bitcoin conference in DC, they were 100% full of it. All talk, no substance. I asked a few pointed questions wrt. Sybil attacks and their responses were so bad that a few of the knowledgeable people (including some Bitcoin-qt devs) present couldn't help but laugh. It was very transparently some sort of investor money grab. I would take anything they say with a serious grain of salt.
Your inability to set up constraints in IB is just that: your inability. I get very complex things done including animations in IB.

The time gained by not having to restart the app every time you tweak the UI is immense.

I generally use storyboards to set up navigation, but depending on the project I'll do the majority in code (lots of similar screens) or do every screen by hand with some common controls in code that render in IB when every screen is really different.

I am no too dogmatic about it, I will touch the subject when interviewing people but I am more interested in a balanced view than rabid hatred for either method.
"B" doesn't perform maximum regen, although it does increase the regen at shut throttle. The bigger difference is that once the battery is fully topped off, it will increase the engine RPM to allow for some engine braking.
Oh wow. I wonder how upset you would be when you realize that some gas stations put a $100 hold on your credit card. Btw. a hold is not a charge. A charge is only when it shows up on your credit card bill as a charge and not as a hold.

I do not see what the issue is with having a $25 hold? It's not a charge.
Ah, but the other half of life insurance companies frequently sell annuities, which are bets you'll die soon enough. :)
Proof that HN is out-of-touch...
(IANAL) I don't think it's legal, but "it can be difficult to prove that prices dropped because of deliberate predatory pricing rather than legitimate price competition. In any case, competitors may be driven out of the market before the case is ever heard."[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing
> The end game is a company with self driving cars, having SIGNIFICANTLY less overhead than they currently do with human drivers. And, probably a ton of technology patents to boot?

This is never going to happen. This is a pipe dream. Self-driving cars are so far away from being a reality that you might as well assume you'll never live to see them, and Uber will certainly expire long before they arrive on the scene.
> They can't vote their conscience.

Surprisingly, four electors for Hillary didn't show up, and another four didn't vote for her. So in addition to the two that didn't vote for Trump, it looks like they might vote their conscience indeed.

EDIT: Oh, I see, the votes for Powell were an attempt to move Rep. electors off Trump. Makes more sense to me now.
Watching someone else do it is still less effective than bashing your head against the problem yourself before watching them do it.

Whether or not you succeed in solving it on your own, it will emotionally invest you in the problem and its solution while showing you what didn't work and having a better handle on the shape of the problem. This lets you get more out of seeing someone else work out the solution.
> anybody with a car and a laptop can create a viable Uber competitor

It's a bit more complicated than that...
Yes, and those totally do not get resold on eBay... ;-)

Electric AC induction motors have very few breaking parts. The things that can break are more along the inverter/controller (capacitors, FET avalanche wear, etc) and auxiliary systems (A/C, etc.)

One great thing about electric cars is that you don't need oil changes, belt replacements, or spark plug tune ups!
Well, I suspect the general theory is that decreasing revenues to internet porn outfits will put a damper on the entire online porn industry, which will, in some measure, reduce demand in the trafficking industry...
Where I live they were already working to phase out the medallion system by introducing new permits for cabs that don't require medallions. They're cabs just the same, with the same requirements for insurance and such, but were a way of expanding the number of cabs without expanding the medallion pool.

This softens the depreciation in the medallion market. The cab drivers who paid a lot of money for their medallions would be furious if they're worthless overnight. This way it takes 10-15 years for them to fully depreciate.

Then Uber showed up and decided they didn't need a proper license or anything and shit got crazy.
We're in a simulation, and nobody seem to care
Show HN: A Node.js + Socket.IO Buzzer for Holiday Parties
Oh, you forgot:

4. Dump all your drivers once your self-piloting cars come fully online

Drivers are just the stepping stone...
Wow, those are some great articles with interesting points. That paints a very grim and brutal picture for Uber.
https://c9.io/
Yea, Google drove a blind man to Taco Bell in 2012 and still hasn't released a self driving car 4 years later.

Meanwhile, Uber's been in the self driving car business half that time? They already looks more likely to actually have these things on the road, and, they have the incentive, and cash pool to do it.

Another reason people "get this impression" is that Google has a history of interesting projects that never made it to market. Waymo gives me more confidence, but I'm still skeptical.
Newton was the first to experiment with light reflectance of glass of various thicknesses. He found the relationship but had no idea how a light corpuscule could know the thickness of the glass when it decided to reflect or not. Newton published his corpuscular theory of light but I certainly don't think he would have claimed to know what was going on.
Yes, but the amount is held for a few days. Even after cancelling the ride, it took 3 days for the hold to clear.

I'm still building credit (no history), which is why I'm not using a credit card. I believe holds only take place with debit cards.
Uber: the worlds fastest growing charity.
Automate android device with 123autoit(root/non root)
I don't totally agree with that.

A law should either be enforced close to 100% of the time (with exceptions at the discretion of a court), or 0% of the time (ie. the law should not exist).

If jay walking, pot smoking, or anti-sodemy laws are not really enforced, to me that's a sign that they should be taken off the books. In an over-legislated society, we should focus on having strong core legislations that everyone agrees with.

Crimes like murder and rape, on the other hand, should be enforced as close to 100% of the time as possible.
I have a set of rules for load shedding that I urge you to consider. First, and foremost, whenever you read (or are about to say) "load shedding" just mentally substitute the correct terminology, which is "intentionally serving errors." This will put you in the right frame of mind to properly ponder the outcomes.

Secondly, the error path on your backend must be strictly cheaper than the success path, or the whole scheme doesn't work. Particularly bad actions on error are for example logging an error at such a high severity that the log files need to be flushed and synced, which is likely to be tremendously expensive. Another example is taking a mutex and incrementing some error counter that normally wouldn't be incremented on the serving path. If this tends to synchronize all your serving threads, your server will collapse.

Third, load shedding can only be implemented correctly if you control the client and the server, end-to-end. Perhaps you want to avoid hot spots by serving a soft error from an overloaded shard. If your client is guaranteed to try another shard (or just give up) this is a good approach. If the client might retry on the same shard, then it's not helpful. You just "shed load" in such a way that you had to serve the same request twice.
YULE-OGY 2016 – Help burn 2016 for good
Side note, profitability is generally described as "into the black" not the green. Amazon is probably the best example, their GAAP losses totalled several billion dollars for a decade or so before they flipped the switch.
The bootstrapped startup that forearmed its users against a cash famine
Ohh. That makes sense. So it took $25 away from your actual money, right? I can see how that is trouble some.

Sorry, I assumed you used a credit card.
The amount of mismanagement and lack of foresight on both sides of the aisle is disgusting.
I mean, you can rinse it. Probably should, really. I hope I don't need to specify "don't use soap on food" in so many words...
Yeah, straight from my checking account. No worries bro :)
Uber's self driving tech really seems like a shiny object to distract VC's with.
Thanks for pointing out the context of when the pg comment was made. I wasn't aware of this, and the comment makes more sense to me now. It also reinforces—for me at least—that having separate "agree/disagree" and "constructive/unproductive" button pairs may be a good idea. Open questions:

- how they'd play into karma (probably just the constructive/unproductive points, maybe agree/disagree displayed as a pair but not contribute to karma)

- whether this is would be too complex from a UX perspective

- while I think "disagree" and "unproductive" can be usefully distinguished, whether "agree" and "constructive" would be useful. That said, if we want people to comment for disagreement (substantively, I would hope), I wouldn't want to see or encourage a bunch of "+1" or "me, too", or "this" comments. I think users want to show support for good comments, and up-votes are currently the only way to do this if you have nothing else to add.
Agreed, and I'll add a few things.

You can argue that lots of games can/do modify things while running. Entity systems allow components to be added at runtime. This not only allows for different code to be executed, but also I've seen code that reads components and hot loads additional code for systems supporting those components if necessary, which can be done a number of ways, and raw from the source even.

Smalltalk also supported this and isn't really functional. In addition to the Smalltalk environment itself pretty much being a live environment, I saw things like serializable continuations in Smalltalk. You could do fun things like a Gemstone Smalltalk app I saw that would take the image state and allow hot modifications via a bug tracker.

There's tons of other systems for doing this. And it's also a reason why many games write big chunks of the type code you would want to hot load in scripting languages like Lua.

There are tons more examples and has no relationship to functional programming other than to say that it was a common thing in the Lisp world many moons before most of these other things existed.
I already do this with AIDE on my pixel C, it costs around 1400-2k for a machine that can reasonably run android studio. I use termux for node and front end development.
Using a credit card builds your credit. Just remember to always pay it back (in full) on time.
> perhaps younger doctors are better.

That's an interesting observation. On the one hand younger doctors have been more recently exposed to "current" ideas, research, and stuff. On the other hand younger doctors lack the experience to catch things that are unusual and often discussed as theoretical.

I'd be curious to see if there were research on this topic now!
An Uber driver told me about the time he picked up a credit-card thief. The guy just asked to be driven around (in his SUV) from one side of New York to the other. As the fare ended, he'd hail the driver with a new credit card and start a new one. At one point, he stopped at a house and walked out with a new stack of cards.

The driver [EDIT: said he] was prohibited, by law, from kicking the passenger out mid-trip. Right afterwards, he went to the police station and tried to report the crime. He was told he was free to report it, but it was a low-priority crime that was unlikely to get investigated.
See my simple Tetris Game, https://github.com/jstimpfle/tetris-on-a-plane/blob/master/t..., at the very bottom.

This implements a state machine in Javascript. It's a very simple case with only 2 states, "playing" and "paused". Each state registers its own event handlers on entrance, and unregisters them on leave.

This approach avoids the need to answer the question "where am I? what should I do?" every time an event handler is called.

While I think the approach is nice, the code is not so nice from a superficial point of view. The more general problem is that event-style sucks. Look up CSP by Tony Hoare, and Occam the language. What we need is better formalisms for sequential programs that include non-determinism like user events (i.e. view the user as part of the program).

(And, of course, also parallel execution of these sequential threads, and also sub-states that can access parent states in a way. Look up Harel's Statecharts. A good example would be a form with two text input boxes. We could view them as parallel sub-threads of the form thread).
Hacksaw Documentation
Attention former Time Warner customers: Get ready for your cable bill to go up
A packet of Maruchan ramen with two cans of beans/peas is the most optimal meal I have been able to come up with considering satiety, minimal preparation and clean-up time and effort, and nutrition. Less than $2, years of shelf-life in almost any conditions, and no facilities other than hot water needed.
With finances like this, Uber will either collapse in a gigantic, money-fueled fireball, or decimate transport. How long can everyone hold out?
which is maybe why the losses are a little less dramatic than they sound. once they eliminate their network of independent contractors I'm sure the financials look a whole lot better. ultimately they are just another boring logistics company.
I think there are intangible things that get lost when you watch someone else do something as opposed to doing it yourself. The exercise is about going through the mental motions of understanding the problem, designing a solution, and iterating on it until it's correct. The last part is all about learning from your own mistakes, seeing what specific things trip you up, so you know to improve on them. That's not something you can get by watching others.

I agree that there isn't enough time in a life to learn everything you'd want to first hand or from a low level of abstraction, but school should be a place to do as much of it as possible. Just my 2c.
This here doesn't apply.

Uber isn't a cash venture, and several activities in the US require either a credit card upon which temporary authorizations can be placed, or a full (and sometimes, over-)payment on a debit card, the difference being that the debit card isn't backed by a line of credit that becomes due in at least 20 days, but rather it is spent directly out of a checking account.

You need this for:

- gas stations

- hotel stays

- car rentals

- sit-down restaurants or bars

The SV/HN is out of touch argument doesn't fly here. Rather, there is a wide gulf in the spending ability and access to services between a US credit card owner therefore a participant in the mainstream banking system, vs. someone with only a checking account, vs. a person who can't qualify for either and conducts their affairs with cash. This is a problem much older and much more foundational than the Bay Area vs. everyone else and the techies and non-techies divide, and is a significant delineation between the US middle class and lower class.
That's a good question. As far as I know these losses are pretty epic, so it's somewhat uncharted territory. They're also not directly comparable to previous unicorns because of their cost structure. They also can't exactly amp up the website ads to cash in on advertising, like previous big losers who turned things around.
"Nice hat"
First use of graphene to detect cancer cells
Ask HN: How to start freelancing while working under anti-moonlighting contract?
I'd like to quit my job and be a freelancer instead, but not sure the best way to start. I'm currently working full time as a developer at a company with an anti-moonlighting contract, basically saying I can't take on any other work without their permission.
I know the safest thing to do is start freelancing on the side first and wait until you have some clients before quitting, but that doesn't seem like a feasible option for me. I was planning on spending 4-6 months building up a portfolio of personal projects, maybe get a client lined up, and then quit before actually freelancing. I also have savings to last a couple years so I wouldn't be desperate for work right away.
Has anyone been in a similar situation before? How did it go?
I have a hard time with hit myself. Mixpanel is another competitor here and, when properly integrated, it can show some pretty shocking details about app usage. Great for optimization, poor for user privacy.
So others in this thread are calling it venture capital subsidized transportation.

Why does the idea of venture capital charity seem so hilariously backwards?
China fines firms for using BMW-like trademark: media
Haha, you're right - I did not phrase that correctly: I use a secured CC sparingly to avoid over-utilization. In this case, I had to use my debit card.
I don't understand how Uber "looks more likely to actually have these things on the road" when Google's cars have been driving people around Mountain View for years. Please explain.
Maybe they should just make Uber illegal and then there would be no predatory pricing.
Since when do hackers bleat about obeying laws and regulations? What happened to having a "we can do better" mindset?

Since when does hackerdom constitute blindly following dogma, whether it be libertarian or not?
I think you forgot to factor in your time cost of planning and preparation. What is your time worth to you? Mine is certainly greater than the extra cost of ordering in.
If you find yourself starting a comment with “not to sound rude”, you might consider whether skipping the comment altogether is the best way to not be rude.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_criteria

A useful guideline for both personal and professional goal setting.
What's the back of the envelope calculation?
Hasn't Amazon been losing money for a long time?
Gas stations, restaurants, and bars , IME, have no problems with cash.
One of the comment on Amazon:

"I first read Journey of Souls a few years ago, and had the same feeling of resonance that many reviewers did. But I wasn't convinced and still wanted to know more. I wrote to a reviewer on this site who had visited him, and following her suggestion, wrote to Dr. Newton for an appointment. At the time, he had a three-year waiting list, and was seeing about 2-3 clients a week. I saw him just before Destiny of Souls was completed, and while I did not experience my memories with the same clarity the subjects in his book did, I can say with utter certainty that Dr. Newton is not making it up, and is not manipulating his readers.

From my conversations with him, I have found him to be very intelligent, caring, funny, and honest. My experience in hypnosis was a bit unsettling for me, as much as the skeptic in me wanted to dismiss the truths I had learned about myself, I could not attribute my memories to anything that I had seen in his books or elsewhere. Nor did he plant the ideas in my head. He is absolutely the stubborn investigator he describes in his books and challenged the things I said, questioned me during the session, compared to things I had said earlier to make sure I was still saying the same things. Then, at the end of the session told me where I had said something similar to his other clients that had not been in Journey of Souls (but is now in Destiny), such as my detailed explanation of the medallion worn by one of the "Council" members.
In retrospect, I think the most amazing thing about my session was my casual attitude - as I talked about "unbelievable" things like hybrid souls I might as well have been telling him "the sky is blue" with the nonchalant way I felt. In fact, a few times I did get frustrated with his questioning, the same way someone would if challenged with "No, the sky is GREEN". What I was saying felt then, as it does now, to be nothing but pure and simple truth.

For the further skeptical, my small claim to fame is that one of his "One of my clients said.." comments to illustrate a point about soul names was something I told him after my session. So I know that whenever he says a client said something, they did.

I would encourage anyone who is interested in having this regression done, to write to him care of his publisher and include a self-addressed stamped envelope. This is the only way to contact him. One note though, he is currently in the process of retiring his practice and directs new clients to people that he has trained from across the country. Even if you don't see him personally, though, the experience of the regression is absolutely worth it."
Not all places do it. It's mostly common in lower income areas
I would rephrase that: rich venture capitalists voluntarily redistributing their limited partners wealth to the general public.
In a perfect world I would agree with you. But we do not live in a perfect world. We live in a world where laws are made by fallible humans, and sometimes they get it wrong. Inefficiency is a useful mechanism to protect us from legislative foibles.
Not parent, but years ago after hearing that Uber employees were sending fake Lyft requests I decided I didn't want to support a company that would engage in those types of shady practices
I think there is something here about male to female size ratio in breeding pairs, but I am having a hard time deciphering it.