skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've never heard anything positive about the company itself, ever. Their "product" is generally decent for me but it seems to be run by a bunch of immature clowns. Even that whole issue last year about ditching Postgres seemed rather suspect in how they approached it.

I doubt everyone who works there acts like a spoiled brat but when upper management does, it enables the behavior of everyone else.
A DOOM flavored primer to reinforcement learning
I guess some algorithm might have changed, because it's really odd to see that a thread like this one about S3 has already gained 2.5k votes https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13755673. I don't remember seeing that amount of votes to threads like this during the past year.
Don't taxis as a business compete with car ownership?
So why did the outage occur?
It's just too easy to jump on Uber hate bandwagon but I seriously hope their bubble will just burst in 2017, then the whole "economy of sharing" will take a hit and similiar services will start show some maturity. Contract of employment would be a good start.
Would you pay less for it? Biking places in any weather and with reasonable amounts of cargo is very much a solved problem. Been doing it for years, have never needed an Uber or Lyft. Granted I don't know where you live, but moving to where this is possible, is kind of part of the deal. I moved across the country.
Unit 731
> I suspect WebAssembly is going to create a niche for very lightweight engines optimized for download footprint, too.

I wanted to create a simple 2D game once, aiming for lot of platforms, including mobile and web. Most engines (I looked into Unity and Godot) produced just too heavy results for web. I ended up using Haxe/Flixel.
I doubt it. It looks too well written. If it's an algorithm I'd be seriously impressed.
It seems to me the Uber driver should find a different job if he's not able to make a go of it. What possible benefit to arguing about pricing with the passenger, regardless whether he's the CEO? I admit, I'd be intrigued if I knew my passenger was the Uber CEO -- I might ask some polite questions about the direction of the company and so forth but probably not directly argue with the man regardless of the CEO's people skills or lack thereof :)
Uber drivers are not employees. Uber is a vendor to its drivers. In fact, Uber's existence depends on no employee relationship existing.
Wow. I had to go look it up, and yes new Escalades start in the 80s now.
A "college frathouse" isn't the default attitude of human beings. You don't create a toxic bro-themed caricature of a company from a lack of skill.

In fact I'd say it takes more effort, and deep-seated character flaws, to create such a culture, considering most of his employees are probably well-adjusted people with prior experiences that had to be unlearned.
That is very possibly accurate. Redswoosh lost the support VC's in ~2001, and it was just him, in a shared office with a single engineer. He stuck with it though where most would have abandoned it, and was able to sell it years later to Akamai, and RedSwoosh was a dog of a product. [1] [2] To say he pushed hard is an understatement. That's his mindset, he's cocky but he believes in what he's doing, and he keeps pushing no matter what. The difference is, Uber is a success by all measures, [3] and it may need a different mentality to move it forward.

[1]: http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-travis-kalanick-bio-2014...

[2]: https://gigaom.com/2008/05/03/whatever-happened-to-red-swoos...

[3]: http://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-uber-and-its-rise-...
Ask HN: Startups, Taxes, and Developer Time
I work at a startup that recently received its second round of funding.

Recently, my development team was told that we needed to figure out the number of hours spent on bug fixes versus new features for the purposes of determining expenses vs assets.

My question to the HN community: Is this normal practice? I've worked for Fortune 500s, non-profits, small businesses, and startups. I've never seen this practice done before, and honestly, the amount of time that it would take to determine this information seems prohibitively costly.
The Rogue Neuroscientist on a Mission to Hack Peer Review
I just switched from AMD to NVidia because of driver issue. I run Arch Linux, and my experience is that installing NVidia drivers is miles ahead of AMD.
RDS has snapshot backups you can create an instance from iirc so you can self fix this kind of issues.

Sure you get downtime all the same but not the waiting for support to solve an instance crash part
If anyone is curious, the first paragraph is not mere hyperbole.

This is the Origins of Totalitarianism meme regarding the never-ending process of power generation, expressed in direct theistic terms. Curiously enough it was discussed on HN 3 days ago (!!!)

You can find the quote by doing a google search for the (quoted text) "which had entered the path".

The comment is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13738426
Through this blog
https://antonioleiva.com/kotlin/
And his book I was able to become fairly productive in the language in only a few weeks. I was familiar with Scala however.
The automatic conversion of java to Kotlin in Intelli J's IDEs also helped immensely.
KPIs: Definition, Dashboards, and Tools
"University IT" is more than a helpdesk, and also requires services like storage, backups, networking and monitoring.

It's very cost effective to host these in a university data centre. They probably get a good deal on power. The Internet connection costs a token amount at a few peering points. Petabytes of research data probably already needs a fancy backup system, adding some documents isn't going to increase the cost of that by much. There are already staff who deal with hardware.
Curious, if you were aiming at writing in a functional programming style, why didn't you try Clojure?
Show HN: fman – file manager for programmers
There is an interesting theory [1] that Uber's value prop to consumers is dependent on subsidizing 59% of the cost of each ride. Over time they have to remove this subsidy to stem the Billion $ annual losses. The relationship with drivers will undoubtedly be more strained over the coming years, whether it happens as a financial necessity or due to Uber's push into self-driving. Managing the nuance of this transition will be one of the greatest challenges for Uber and require strong skills in empathy, communication and strategic thinking.

[1] http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/11/can-uber-ever-deliver...
Exactly the same for me. Every time I wanted to use Twitter I ended up confused by all that mess and closed it. Is it so hard to add tools (filters, permissions etc.) for more advanced users to create the experience they want? Twitter makes a wonderful media to follow interesting persons and getting breaking news, but probably 99.9% of its content for me is spam or uninteresting, annoying mess that I have no convenient way to avoid.
Ravioli code
China manipulates its currency, disregards WTO standards and blatantly prevents foreign companies from dominating their market. Not to mention you have to hand over your company secrets to them if you need their 1.3B market access.

On the other hand, India is much more transparent and follows open market, Any foreign company can freely operate there without being feared of getting disadvantaged over local competition.

Btw, USA and other western power blatantly bullies India and other third world countries alike. When India started making cheap solar panels, USA dragged them to court. In the 90s, India started producing cheap fertilizers for their farmers.. oops, big daddy us doesn't likes it because it hurts the interest of Monsanto. So stop playing this US vs Them game.

Such nation of hypocrites. Takes proud in Democracy and free market capitalism but hates when it plays out on the world stage.
Do you have a link to one of these?
He can apologize by resigning and going back to the frat that he came from.
I think it's intuitive. As an example look at people who got in shape, I know a few and they all developed a "passion" for working out.

Unless there is such a thing as a "passion" gene.
That guy says his must-have feature of c++ is operator/function overloading. That seems an odd choice to me. I have been a c++ developer for over a decade. I would have leaned more towards it being a necessary evil.
VR headsets don't have that level of resolution yet. There will still be visible pixels for years to come. I believe it was either Carmack or Gabe Newell who said you'd need nearly 50k vertical pixels for true photo realism, I may be mistaken though.
By that token, taxi companies aren't taxi companies.

Uber is a taxi company. Actually it's a taxi middleman because it doesn't want to treat drivers as employees.
Maybe it's my anti-Reddit bias coming out, I dunno. shrug

(Which is ironic as I'm a Reddit mod on an active sub with ~4,500 members)
I've followed Bill around, bad trees don't give good fruit; just because the information comes from a non-bought source and contradicts what you imagined to be true; that doesn't make it fake or turn the comment into trolling.
Show HN: ScribbleChat – A chat app with real handwriting and emotion
Yes, it is. Uber isn't the driver's employer. Uber is a vendor to the driver. The driver is complaining that its vendor made commitments, on which the driver depended, and then reneged. The driver might be right or might be wrong, but in no discussion with a vendor in the history of the Fortune 500 has it ever been OK for the vendor to accuse their customer of "not taking responsibility for their own shit".

What the video shows isn't wrong on the level of the Fowler post. It just shows Kalanick as petty and deeply unserious about his role, which is an alarming look for someone whose company is embroiled in scandals about mismanagement.
> they already have a brand name

A brand which has been horribly damaged. I started using Uber back in 2011 before UberX was rolled out. It was a great service with professional drivers. It was more expensive then cabs, but worth it for the incredible service. I was encouraging friends to use the app and got our company on business service about a year ago.

A month ago, I deleted the app.

Their brand is crap and they hve become the public face of the worst excesses of Tech Bro Douche culture. Their current brand ain't going to save them.
Many, many, many years ago I'd picked up a (then new) copy of Arthur Bloch's Murphys' Law and Other Reasons Things Go Wrong. With the "Wrong" printed upside-down, of course.

At the time, I found it an amusing set of anecdotes and quips.

As I've grown older, it's struck me that this might be the closest thing to a contemporary bible, based on technical experience. The deep truths (and arch cynicism) of the laws are enduring.
Unfortunately, it seems that the organizational culture in NA (and in South Asia, from my friends and family that work there) is extremely union hostile.
Adversarial examples for generative models
What should we do about the 70 hour work week? Somewhat sarcastic, but mostly serious.
Exactly. I think there should be a disclaimer saying that those charts don't represent the actual consensus/reality and should not be taken at face value. They're not accurate and even conflate categories/products which are not comparable.
I haven't seen any evidence of thought on Twitter for a long time, condensed or otherwise.
Hey, these pages open fine in my old browser and that's cool enough for me. As for the pattern… I need the help of some AI for I am slow at pattern recognition :D
The 5 minute logo
Net neutrality is two years old this week –and Republicans still want to kill it
This is a good point. At a prior company we pulled our outsourced IT from India and went to the Philippines. Even there wages were quickly rising, and there was constant turnover as people job hopped for more money.

I finally convinced the company to just hire a couple people locally, and they were much better off for it.
I would have expected some privacy also. If there is no policy on this in Uber then this may be a greater blow to the their brand than anything else in this affair.

Personally I do not see what Kalanick did wrong here. He did not seek personal interaction with the driver. He was not abusive and IMO responded at the same level at which the driver engaged him.

That is all separate from my opinions about the (from my perspective) problem with replacing a publicly funded transport service with a for-profit effective monopoly.

There should be city-wide public transport running 24/7 driven by trained, unionized workers. Not a race-to-the-bottom, gig-economy semi-monopoly.
Seriously? Who do you think wrote the Wikipedia entry, and why?
Is the government the ultimate arbiter of science? Is it not possible to have access to medicines and have relevant scientific information without being subjugated by bureaucratic proxies for big pharma[1]?

>People, often children with no real informed consent, die every year because they forsake science-based medicine for quackery.

People, often children, die every year due to "science-based medicine" as well. Overdose deaths involving prescription opioids have quadrupled since 1999, and so have sales of these prescription drugs[2].

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

[2]https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/data/overdose.html
The taxis here in Edinburgh are great - the problem I have is when you travel somewhere else and they are often awful: rude, attempting scams, refusing to take you somewhere....

I guess services like Uber have that advantage of relative ubiquity....
That's fine. Depending on what's available, I suggest getting a vape pen and using concentrates. With the heat dialed low, it's just steam.
Yep. The only sin in the U.S. is being poor. The rest you can buy your way out of.
He made a PR mistake. You don't drink and have fun like that in a crisis (or at least don't get caught doing it.)

Note: I'm not saying Uber's only mistake is PR. But it's a large part of what precipitates the unique reaction against them versus, say, Lyft. #DeleteUber? Came up because Uber cancelled surge at 7:36PM around a protest at JFK that was scheduled at 4:55 to last from 6 to 7PM. Lyft, meanwhile, earned more money and got a better reaction.

Similarly, in reaction to Fowler's account, instead of doing something substantive they hired an Uber Director, the head of the department implicated and an Uber lobbyist to conduct an "independent" investigation.
Coati Source Explorer 0.11 released. Providing a pre-indexed project for Clang
Uber is the new sharecropping
They can patent a process that gives them very reliable dosages, though. And like the other reply said, the Generic companies aren't relying on the patent protection anyway.

They might find different sorts of chemical structures that are theraputically superior than LSD itself as well, but this stuff wont' happen without minimally having LSD medically legal.

They can still sell the patented "alternatives" : LSD isn't a cure-all and isn't necessarily ideal for everyone. Besides, these patents will eventually run out, so they'll have to think up new ideas nevertheless.
A Neuromorphic Motion Controller for a Biped Robot
Personal portfolio website with endurojs
> doorhandles are all intuitive

Doors maybe, but I often hear "how do you open the trunk?"

Some only open from the cabin, some have an obvious knob outside, some have a concealed knob below the registration plate, sometimes you press the company logo...
I sure hope so. I think one of the barriers may be the compatibility with a lot of the devices coming out in VR. For example, to build something for the Hololens, Unity3D is the only option. IIRC, for Oculus, the only OSS game engine that targets it is Torque3D. I'm not sure how much cooperation these engines need from the manufacturers to begin targeting them, but that can be hard for OSS projects to do.
Yes they are. They're a company which provides a car and driver to get from point A to point B on demand. That's a taxi company.

If you want someone competing with car ownership look at companies like Zipcar.
Same. The conspiracy side of me wants to think that it was staged so he can apologize without having to touch the deeper issues surrounding uber now and thereby improving his image
You are far too serious a person.

I actually stand by the sentiment. Wordpress is a virus, and like jQuery, it has negatively impacted the development scene of the language is lives in. PHP, on the cusp of becoming a more respectable language (I freely admit my love for PHP, to this day, even though I primarily work in Java and Python now), was taken over by WP "developers" who flooded the market and sell themselves as engineers when all they can do is copypasta a few wordpress idioms.

I don't hate on wordpress itself, its a fine, though early on troubled codebase. The predatory community it has created, the security issues it continues to create, and the low-barrier to entry that floods the market with a ton of really bad code isn't something I would want to bring into another language's world.

And here's where the light-hearted part comes in... I know that projects like these would NEVER actually cause that kind of effect on their language because nobody would take it seriously... but the analogy of what COULD happen (you know, fictional, like ridiculous unrealism of the base concept of the movie) was apt.

I fail to understand why in a world so caught up in negativity and rigidness, people chose to not allow themselves to enjoy or notice light-hearted humor, and actively defend their stance against it, as if somehow eliminating light hearted jest is a benefit to a world already buried in such negativity...
Sort of like how my Firefox does support yubikey through an extention, but Google just hardcodes the user agent as not working.
Cellular automata are just a subclass of graph evolution algorithms constrained to a regular grid comprised of homogeneous nodes. Neural networks are also graph evolution algorithms, and logical programs can be modeled this way as well.

Cellular automata are just a toy branch of a tree that is thriving like crazy.
No it will continue to be used until the price is closer to the price of similar spec windows laptops. Where I live at the moment its anywhere from 2x to 1.5x the exact same components in a shell not made by apple
I've heard it said on another thread that the board can't actually fire Kalanick. I couldn't find anything on Wikipedia that could verify this. Anybody know if it's true?
I'd bet that's simply due to advertising. Advertising within TV is insanely tied to location, and we're just now starting to figure out online advertising. TV has country, local, regional, etc ratings and reach to judge ads and prices by.. i'm not sure how much, if any of that, is standardized by advertising.

It's written in the law too, mind you, so i'd be curious if online advertising ends up with some standards that providers have to adhere to. Ie, allowing regional ads, knowing the reach, etc.
Kotlin for me is Java made right. It's not complex, it has awesome interoperability with Java, it uses JDK, not reinventing its own wheels and it has everything I need from modern language.

But it seems that Jetbrains has its own vision for Kotlin being a completely independent language. So while it works for me right now, I'm not sure if it will work in the future. They are going native and it'll bring a lot of changes, for sure. Honestly I would prefer it to stay as Java enhancer, as I'm not interested in Native and I need very little JavaScript interoperability, if any (probably just translating some common code between backend and frontend).

But we will see, I don't want to sound too pessimistic. Kotlin is the best language I've used so far.
If he was really a good professional CEO and leader, he would have asked for the guys number or given his, and had his EA follow up the next day to chat in the office. This just shows how lacking in experience and measure he is, you just shouldn't act like this, especially if you're the CEO of a company that employees many people who rely on you to make sure they can put their kids through school/food on table. Arguing your supply chain costs with a component of your supply chain in the back of a car isn't constructive.
From what I've seen, Uber is far more convenient than taxis. When I call a taxi I have to wait anywhere from 20 - 40 minutes only to ride in a usually dirty vehicle for inflated prices by an aggressive driver. Never mind the typical "our VISA machine isn't working" bit.

I've literally never waited more than 5 minutes for an Uber and it's usually closer to 2 - 3. They're fast, clean, fare splitting is a non-issue, and the drivers are almost always friendly. It really is on a different level than taxis in my experience.
What? That sounds like nonsense. Some sources please.
Many more jobs have been outsourced to India through American companies like HP, IBM, DELL.

Is outsourcing a problem worth mentioning only when a company incorporated in India gets such contracts?

Or, is there a subtle hint of racial/country bias against Indians?

I ask this because I never see such damning articles when whole departments/section of companies are closed when outsourced to American companies. And circumstances are very similar.

Older employees cost company more because of America's awesome healthcare and insurance system. Techn knowledge gets commoditised and automated so quickly, these older employees are almost always phased out by outsourcing the jobs.

It's just that when the company getting that contract is Indian, all hell breaks loose.
I agree. From my perspective the driver attacked him verbally and didn't like a robust defence.

All that said, I hope Uber and similar gig-economy services die a fiery death in the near future.
When I sell my products/services to others, globalization is good but when others sell their products/services to me, globalization is bad.
I think you're probably not used to the extra estrogen then. I think you're seeing a lot more in these post than there really is. Most people don't care.
I think you need to look at the video as the last straw, not the primary cause for this apology. Kalanick has always acted remarkably immaturely for the CEO of a major company [1], and now Uber has dragged themselves into a total shitstorm with the recent sexual discrimination/abuse stories, and the Waymo/Otto IP theft debacle.

He's just trying to save some face for him and the company in the midst of a glut of PR disasters.

[1] https://pando.com/2014/02/27/we-call-that-boob-er-the-four-m...
I doubt she thinks MOND is a candidate for a family of fundamental theories (MOND itself is not relativistic; fixes for that -- at least where the result is a metric theory -- tend to cause geometry problems at solar system and cosmological length scales, and relic radiation is also extremely sensitive to geometry; and why would an extended metric theory have a better answer to perturbative non-renormalizability?).

However, there's lots of scope for taking an unphysical and even incomplete theory seriously [this supergravity researcher puts it well: https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/05/earning-a-phd-by-stu... ]

Relativistic approaches to MOND might eventually raise interesting questions about the EFT, and those are what a QG phenomenologist lives for. So it's easy to see why she'd take MOND seriously without taking it too seriously.

(As an example, Verlinde's recent work is partly provoked by MOND, and it's also nice to see a string theorist step outside of the AdS comfort zone and confront what we see in our sky).