skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Quote: "In a quest to build Uber into the world’s dominant ride-hailing entity, Mr. Kalanick has openly disregarded many rules and norms, backing down only when caught or cornered. He has flouted transportation and safety regulations, bucked against entrenched competitors and capitalized on legal loopholes and gray areas to gain a business advantage."

This is classic malignant narcissism[1]. The irony of the story is that it describes a confrontation with Apple, which became successful through the machinations of another malignant narcissist, Steve Jobs.

1. https://arachnoid.com/ChildrenOfNarcissus
If you read the article, it helped ensure that no drivers were scamming them by creating repeat fake customer accounts to increase the payout bonus.
could not afford to pay for it when I was buying domain name hehe
I really hope Lyft doesn't do anything to screw up, as I've uninstalled Uber and will probably never use the service again. However, I don't see myself going back to regular taxi system as that's even more corrupt and despicable.

I just hope Lyft plays the game with a social conscious and makes positive decisions and continues to treat drivers well (most Lyft drivers I talk to say they like driving for Lyft way better than Uber).

I'm not so sure that as a society we should be rewarding people with drive like this "Mr. Kalanick, 40, is driven to the point that he must win at whatever he puts his mind to and at whatever cost".
There are some books which are more concerned with algorithms (in the correct sense of the term) within the field of Software Studies/Digital Humanities/Critical Code Studies.

Some books and articles:

[1] Protocol by Alexander Galloway

[2] 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1));:GOTO 10 by Nick Montfort et al

[3] On "Sourcery" or Code as Fetish by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun

[4] The Exploit by Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker

I can list many more.

There was also a doctoral seminar taught by Alexander Galloway at NYU in 2010 called The Politics of Code. The reason Galloway's name pops up a ton is that he worked with r-s-g.org and has a fair amount of experience coding in addition to his academic credentials in literary theory.
Don't forget the brilliant Microsoft Excel translation of "power" as in "2 to the power 10" to the danish equivalent of "2 to the current (flow) 10".
That's a lot more plausible. Tracking after you've deleted the app would be pretty surprising.
no that was "legal" in the sense that they forced users to turn on location and they stated they would track you up to 5 minutes after you left your uber, for "safety" reasons.

this article is talking about something else it seems.
It has always been strange for me to understand Google search as a monopoly. First, there are competitors. Second, it's free (yes, I know you pay with data). Third, you can use the internet without using any of Google's services (except adsense, I suppose). How is Google's search a monopoly when it's the user who is deciding they prefer it to Bing or Duck Duck Go or Yahoo? Perhaps my understanding of monopoly is incomplete because this makes no sense to me.
I think the parent was asking whether the single sketches were hand drawn or made with some filters within photoshop.
Pretty much everyone not in Mumbai. Folks in the Konkani regions usually speak it as a secondary language.

Mumbai is a complicated case to deal with.
Are session musicians typically given royalties? I assumed they are just hired to to a job and are given a payment for time in studio.
Bash is such a painful and error-prone language, I'm surprised anyone still writes it accept as a last resort. I've tried to mostly replace bash scripts with Python personally. It'd be excellent to see a bash meta language emerge something like what CoffeeScript or ES6 have done for JavaScript. App-level programmers shouldn't have to deal with this kind of bad "UX" regularly.
I don't think you can support a ridesharing company that by design treats employees as contractors and also be socially conscious .
If you really want to do this use public transportation .
International consensus on debris threat
This is probably off-topic, but I find it a bit irritating that in an article about 'critical thinking' the author is quoting a 2012 paper by some Miyazaki to explain the origin of the word 'algorithm'. I thought we knew about al-khwarizmi long before 2012 and that it is good form that when you present a new fact or discovery, you should try to cite the original research rather than somebody who wrote about it last week.
How far would IBM or Microsoft or Apple have gotten without patents?
Did you just diagnose someone with a condition that isn't found in the DSM and then cite your own website as a source of evidence?
Author has an agenda. He's piggy backing on NYT piece the other day. Timing is interesting with correspondent's dinner fast approaching.
Has replacing scripts with Python worked well for you?

Context: I have the same feelings about Bash.
Security for Startups (2015)
Google got ahead of altavista with better search relevance, but it became a viable business based on AdWords, and to this day this is where it gets a durable advantage. It is hard to make a quantitative case that Google beats Bing today in relevance, but it is an order of magnitude better at competitors at turning clicks into cash.
Man, what happened to Yahoo pipes? A tool that did all this so well.
It'd be nice if Apple had been less pragmatic and more principled and just yanked any version of the Uber app that broke the rules.
"Bart, it's over."

"What do you mean, "It's over"?"

"We're bankrupt. The stock is at zero."

"But I have 52 million shares. What's 52 million times zero? And don't tell me it's zero!"

"Bart, it's not about how much stock you have. It's about how much copper wire you can get out of the building with!"
Most app developers aren't writing the scripts in Linux distros though.
You didn't even understand what you're supposedly disagreeing with.

The locale settings need to be initialised to something, right? What default value would you choose? Miles for everyone, as Google Maps seems to? Km for everyone? Better than either of those is using location to set it to whatever the customary unit is in their country. Otherwise, you're doing the wrong thing for hundreds of millions of users.

Whether this particular setting is in the phone OS or in Google Maps is irrelevant. Either way, it needs to be initialised, and it should be initialised to something sane.
http://i.imgur.com/3mpqkOPh.jpg
The argument here is not that it is directly bad for consumers but that Google is bad for producers, and that in the long run, consumers will suffer from less quality content.
“Radioactive Boy Scout” regularly visited by FBI for a decade, father says
I'm not skeptical about it. Last time I did something similar to this optimization, I had a python function that was doing some work over strings to get a similarity metric.

For this function, a list of elements was kept inside each call, which began empty and a few calculations where performed, populating it before the main loop of the function kicked in. In python-land, this was obviously done by declaring an empty list `precalc_values = []` and then appending over it. When we cythonized it, the dev that took it went in with a `cy_malloc(size(int)*elements)` "dynamic array of ints", and called it a day, 70x speedup over plain python.

A few days later I came in and saw that code, and said "why not go with a simple array?", to which I was told "because we don't know the size of the strings beforehand". Did a test run with a small array plus a counter (to know up to where the array held real values, and not just zero-init fields) and got a 100x speedup.

In the end we went with both functions and a wrapper that would check the length of the strings involved and select one or the other, because the array version would massively crash from accessing an array out of bounds if a large string happened to come by.
> I'm not so sure that as a society we should be rewarding people with drive like this "Mr. Kalanick, 40, is driven to the point that he must win at whatever he puts his mind to and at whatever cost".

I hope he loses big. Losing everything because of a sociopathic drive to win? That's the stuff of classical tragedy.
And this is based on... what, exactly?

1. They didn't break the story, CJR did.

2. Why would they buy so many likes? In my experience, native ad sales revolve around native metrics. Buying bots to like your page (but not visit or interact with your website) won't help you there.
Nit pick:Bethnal Green Ventures is £20,000.

https://bethnalgreenventures.com/about
Perhaps he's referring the the bits sent out from the codec rather than the bits received by the codec?
Since "unroll.me" was anonymizing data[1] and then sold that data to Uber, is it safe to assume that Lyft used the subscription service to manage their drivers/customers contact information? If not, it's not clear to me how "unroll.me" provided that data to Uber.

[1] quote from article: Using an email digest service it owns named Unroll.me, Slice collected its customers’ emailed Lyft receipts from their inboxes and sold the anonymized data to Uber
I'm scared.
Ok, why is that more plausible than USA Today buying fake page views? Why is that such a crazy conspiracy theory?
I do that too, for everybody.

On the other hand, I don't care if bad-mannered people react negatively. I don't mind if it's because they just didn't receive an education or because they received an ideological one.
Yes, "socially conscious" isn't really the ride adjective I was looking for...something more like integrity, or even positive ethics, but that's not the work either.
Let's Encrypt: https://letsencrypt.org/
I don't understand why this article got so many upvotes.

First, I think the entire premise of the article that Google is not really better than other search engines is wrong. And even if that were true that would not be a case of network effect but just brand advantage.

Next, he goes on the say that Google should be regulated, but doesn't say how. I can't really think of a reasonable way that would solve this problem.

EDIT: After thinking about this, I came up with an interesting (hypothetical) proposal: Google gets split into two companies. Both companies get access to the Google source code and neither of them is allowed to use the Google brand name for search.

This would create competition and solve some of the problems. For instance a website could get delisted by Google A, but still get traffic from Google B. I am not sure if it would be a net positive tough.
Pagerank is overrated. It is within a mean field approximation of a simple link count; PR does not improve relevance, it only lets you pick the most popular page from a set of pages that may be more or less relevant. Anchor link text is a far more important contribution to Google's results, but it serves Google well if outsiders get false news about how it works.
>It's not every day that you see an example of someone examining and improving old code, that will result in a measurable benefit to direct and indirect users.

It's even more impressive when you think about the absolute ubiquity of cURL in practically every device imaginable. He's probably single handedly saving many kilowatts of power consumption with fixes like this.
Jebbit and Startup Evolution, Skok on Zaius, UB on Medium – Utterly Biased…
I'm surprised that the author didn't mention the several times a year random strangers will yell "Yarr!" out of the window of a passing car, as they do at me. Even if that doesn't happen to her, this condition must be harder for a woman than it has been for me, so she has my sympathy.

I'm always willing to "show" children that there isn't an eye under the patch, if they want. The same goes for adults who seem childlike enough. (Don't laugh, there are lots of these people around.) Those who are merely dull enough to require immediate satisfaction of their idle curiosities about the deeply personal circumstances of others, never get the truth. We should all practice extemporaneous lying, and this may be the most valuable aspect of monocularity to me. It's easy to say "knife fight", although it takes a bit more effort to sell that. Instead, maybe someone might be more ready to hear about an embarrassing incident involving office furniture repair?
Yeah...pining for the days of banner ads, IE6, Flash and dog-slow JavaScript seems like a very publisher-centric worldview. If Google feels like an oppressive monopoly, it would be from the publisher side of the equation. I can definitely see how it feels like Google gives publishers the privilege of displaying Google ads rather than treating them as an appreciated part of the business.

I remember when Google was becoming mainstream and having friends with websites ask me how they could show up higher in Google rankings. It was usually included with an endorsement of how much they valued the search results as a user. My response was usually to demonstrate a search for their business by name and show them that their site was the first result. This was predictably followed by the protestation, "yes, but I'm talking about keyword?"

Even now, there's an inability for people to see how Google values the different participants in its ecosystem. They're an advertising network that sells its users to advertisers. And it sells its publishers' content to acquire users. Publishers have always been the lowest rung of the ladder. The disconnect usually comes from the fact that most publishers also use Google as users and want the same satisfaction from the publisher experience that they get from the user experience.
This is the scariest thing. Facebook tried to basically monopolize the Internet in India and other developing countries with Internet.org. There's a bunch of info out there on the subject, but this wired article is a good introduction: https://www.wired.com/2015/05/backlash-facebooks-free-intern...
Sounds like unroll.me's customers were Lyft users and unroll.me had access to their emails and/or inboxes in order to "see" the ride receipts.
Unroll.me gets access to the user's entire inbox. It just read all their email and sold it ("anonymized").
REDDIT:

Reddit's /r/diy got me to learn a lot about electronics. The extremely detailed guides which led to something that could ACTUALLY BE USEFUL was a very good motivator.

/r/StopDrinking was also a lot of help for me (to help a friend). I owe a lot to the community there for helping my friend take control of his life again.

/r/fitness also helped me reach a healthy weight and lifestyle after I had a recent health scare.

/r/randomkindness helps me feel good by doing good for others.

/r/cscareerquestions helped me get a great job and taught me a lot about programming (/r/programming and language specific subs) and career.

Humans of New York:

This photoblog by Bradon Stanton was instrumental in helping me develop a much more open mindset about people and eventually led me to volunteer for the UNICEF after they covered a young girl directly impacted by UNICEF. The European Refuge Crisis was a similarly transforming moment for me.

Toastmasters International: This is kind of like Alchoholics Anonymous for people who haven't given a public presentation before.

Countless TED talks also helped shape my thinking and gave me perspective.

Since a lot of the HN populace doesn't like Reddit I wanted to clear it up that the key to using it productively is to follow only subreddits that fill a niche in your life. And prefer subreddits which have more text posts than link posts. Discussion with a wide variety of people is one of reddit's key strengths. As an example, I usually discuss and read comments about foreign policies on multiple country subreddits so that I can get an idea of how it impacts other countries and what the people are concerned about in the other places.
Remembering how things worked bach then, someone probably invoked Catch-22...
Thanks. Had not seen patent language in GPLv2, but it was implied, https://copyleft.org/guide/comprehensive-gpl-guidech7.html

> The GPLv2, despite being silent with respect to patents, actually confers on its licensees more rights to a licensor’s patents than those licenses that purport to address the issue. This is the case because patent law, under the doctrine of implied license, gives to each distributee of a patented article a license from the distributor to practice any patent claims owned or held by the distributor that cover the distributed article. The implied license also extends to any patent claims owned or held by the distributor that cover “reasonably contemplated uses” of the patented article.
In the 1990s VCs openly stated they would not fund Microsoft competitors. There is a huge hole of companies that never started to compete with Google today, just the VCs don't talk about it today.
One annoying thing with the Uber app is that they disabled the option to give access to location only when the app is running. The only option available in the iOS privacy setting is always or never for access to location (unlike other apps).
How did they track these iPhones after the app was uninstalled?
Search engines have improved. Bing, DDG, Yahoo are all better than Altavista. But none of them are as good as Google. That being said, no entity is above criticism. The monopoly criticism just doesn't fit though, unless we're redefining what that word means.
I agree. I first started using SSH in 1996 or so, building it from source on a Linux Slackware system (which didn't even have ELF binaries!)

sftp didn't appear for a few years later.
For some reason odd numbers are used more often than even. Ports 24, 26, 28, 30, 32, 34, 36 are all unassigned to this day.
It may be that having experience with Lexis/Nexis, and having built an inverted index search, I was predisposed to AltaVista, but, for quite a while after I first used Google, I preferred AltaVista, until it began to die from under-investment. But now, for sure, Google has made the "just throw words at it, never mind spelling" model work really well.
There's nothing more frustrating than someone arguing for a position you yourself favor with terrible, easily-knocked-down arguments. I actually do think Google should be regulated, but the author is putting forward the worst possible case. His theories about first mover advantage and network effects are both ridiculous: Google wasn't even the third search engine in existence, and there are little to no network effects in search. They got where they are from quality of product and economy of scale.

Ryan Cooper, try rewriting this article from the angle of the effects of Google's monopoly, not the causes. The causes angle is more tempting, because we understand that regulation should be avoided, and so if it must be done we want to feel like the company did something "bad" to "deserve it", but that's a fallacy.
Nice summary. As a German running a company in the UK, I'm also thinking about a US based corp using Atlas from Stripe.

May I ask in which sector you're working, goods or services?

How do you feel about the hassle that comes with an US based corp compared to the ease of a UK one?
Yes, a poo follower to share/like ratio actually damages the reach of your posts.
One stakes the reputation of an entire company, and one is as easy as a script kiddie setting up a bot.
I can see arguments either way to ask about it or not. I always have an internal debate with myself when I see such things like an eye patch or other non-typical characteristics that stand out. Should I ask? Would it be rude?

Most of the time I get stuck in a do-loop and the person is gone before I have a chance to make a decision. That's probably a good thing, looking at it from a cost/benefit analysis there is no way anyone should ask such a thing. But I also don't want to pretend this obvious thing doesn't exist because it's an elephant in the room! What if the said person expects me to comment on it? What if the person thinks that other people avoid them due to this non-typical characteristic? I certainly don't want to contribute to that either! I have no idea how to approach these things...

My main goal is to treat them like anyone else and I saw someone with a broken leg I'd ask. I forget the comedian but they cover the topic of handicapped people feeling left out because they don't get commented on, they want to feel equal. I think it might have been Carlos Mencia (yeah, yeah, I know, dude steals jokes) but the point stands - if we want to treat people equal aren't we obligated to ask?
Or possibly the author is mistaken, as happens so often in tech journalism.

I'm not going to defend Kalanick, but I'm through with getting emotionally worked up by news articles.
Is it possible to read the article without paywall? Even using the 'web' link and going via Google does not work.
How are they "hostile to sites where the data originates" when Google is the primary driver of traffic to those sites?
Here's the Rolling Stone article Harry penned to get his side across:

http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/harry-shearer-why-my...

Also relevant: Sly Stallone is suing over Demolition Man monies too.

This is getting effing way interesting. Hush money only goes so far considering Shearer has Simpsons F-YOU money and principles on his side.
They mention fingerprinting in the article.

Uber engineers assigned a persistent identity to iPhones with a small piece of code, a practice called “fingerprinting.” Uber could then identify an iPhone and prevent itself from being fooled even after the device was erased of its contents.

There was one problem: Fingerprinting iPhones broke Apple’s rules. Mr. Cook believed that wiping an iPhone should ensure customers that no trace of the owner’s identity remained on the device.

I expect what they do is fingerprint the device to detect fraudulent use later. Typically this is done by combining a bunch of identifiers and details on the device and then hashing the result. The output is a unique identifier for that specific device.

While technically this doesn't store any "identity" information on the device itself, if done correctly, the device could be identified and tracked across wipes (hence Cook's comment).

Of course, the article does a piss poor job explaining this, but for many readers the nuance doesn't matter... They capture the spirit well enough, even if the details are pretty misleading.
There's a difference between improving something and reinventing it.
The reason that works is that it shows others what is possible and what it is like, eventually converting others around you.

In the case of climate change, austerity living may actually be counterproductive towards convincing others.

The change we need in the world is both technology and attitude.
`alloca` is a simple addition to the stack pointer, so a single instruction, presuming it isn't folded into the normal bump of the stack pointer to allocate the fixed size local variables. There isn't really much cost to doing a dynamic stack allocation rather than a fixed one. Variable length arrays (VLAs) allow the same thing but can be slightly more portable.

Normal C caveats do apply here though: alloca is POSIX, not C (but is widely implemented outside of POSIX systems). VLAs are an optional standard feature. Neither is required to actually use the stack for storage.

Not sure if there are any platforms supported by curl which would prevent it's use of VLAs or alloca.
I would guess hand drawn. Every pencil sketch effect I've seen leaves more detail, for example, in the hair. Or if you dial that down, you lose detail in features you want to keep, like the nose. The image that's being discussed: https://static01.nyt.com/images/2017/04/19/technology/24trav...
Only if you don't login and follow the niches that interest you and things that you don't know about. A very good example for me was /r/WritingPrompts because after I wrote a long comment somebody directed me to it and I managed to start writing again.

/r/StopDrinking also helped me help my friend regain control of his life. /r/fitness helped me regain my health.

Then there's /r/randomkindness, /r/bestof, /r/askreddit and /r/cscareerquestions.