skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Uber was just burning through VC cash based on the idea that 'if you're the biggest jerk on the block in every possible sense, capital will decide you're going to be the winner because you're meaner than everybody else'.

Winners don't quit, so Uber is dead to capital now: it was always based on maximum evilness and all the stuff about disrupting and ridesharing was mere window dressing.

Note to capital, wherever it is: this is what you get when you go by personality rather than studying the fundamentals of a business. You can't simply pick the most toxic individual or company, claim they're going to kill everybody else, and then prop them up with valuation. The valuation didn't fail but your pet Dr. Evil did, and that was your proxy for maintaining the 'killer' behavior. Unless or until capital can be personified as evil AIs that cannot die, this was never really an optimal strategy for capital.
Not just that, but how many regular users, too! "Oh, to make that work you have to click here and then click out and you can then start typing..."
Ah, a kindred spirit. I detest forced cheerfulness that is so frequently required from public-facing workers. Be neutral. Be professional. Don't be hostile. That's all acceptable. But that must-be-upbeat-at-all-costs straitjacket... Some people are naturally sunny, and they should be cherished. But the majority probably aren't, and please don't force them. Sometimes you can see the flash of resentment in their eyes, which probably isn't directed at you personally, but won't fail to make you feel shitty if you're attuned to it.
Little known fact: ! is pronounced 'dammit' in when in vim.

(at least for emacs users)
With AP1 they were the only company that had anything approaching level 2/3 in a publicly available production vehicle. Google might have been ahead of them but it's hard to tell since all we ever saw were carefully staged demos.
"when Ubuntu popped up in 2004, its biggest opponent (Microsoft) was very vulnerable"

this is pure fantasy. no reason to take this author seriously.
I might be wrong, but I think Julia's financing is nowhere near enough to hire someone like Lattner.
Kalanick is no Steve Jobs,

Kalanick is a bro on an ego trip who stumbled upon a business. But harassing women, and all his other flaws, are not what created uber.

Steve Jobs' flaws actually served Apple. The worst he's been accused of is driving people hard to achieve the perfection he sought.
150+ Best Marketing Tools: Ultimate List
and.... my eyes glaze over.
I installed Debian on my Libretto 30 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_Libretto - AMD 586 DX4 100 MHz, 8 MB RAM) some time in 2000. It worked pretty well - PCMCIA networking, X11 and so on. I think I used the installation technique of removing the hard disk and pre-loading Linux onto it. The machine was of course far too small to have a floppy or CD drive, and predated USB.

(I also kept the Win95 partition)

Given sufficient interest I'm sure I could produce pictures.
I guess you missed http://joelgrus.com/2016/05/23/fizz-buzz-in-tensorflow/

Along with a thorough discussion about why it works and how it could be improved would give me pretty good faith about a data engineer's capabilities.
If I work an hour, I should be paid for an hour. The whole salary thing creates a situation where employers are incentivized to get workers to work as many hours as possible because its free labor. If workers were paid for each hour of work regardless, it would force employers to properly account for the cost instead of shifting it to the employees.
It's #5a5a5a. That's not "nearly black" is my book.
Another definition of 1 oom is anything between sqrt(10) and sqrt(10)*10. Basically 3 to 30. 2 oom, 30 to 300, and so on.

So if the (now edited) original intent was exponential, "more like 10x than 1x (or 100x)", then calling 5x an oom is fine. If the intent was linear, then yes, rounding 5x to 10x is 100 percent error (difference/actual). :)
Have used it in production for > 2 years, mainly for ETL/Data processing type jobs which seems to work well.

We also use it to perform scheduled tasks (e.g. every hour) which is good as it means you don't have to have an EC2 instance just to run cron like jobs.

The main downside is Cloudwatch Logs, if you have a Lambda that runs very frequently (i.e. 100,000+ invocations a day) the logs become painful to search through, you have to end up exporting them to S3 or ElasticSearch.
Here is a great explanation of parser combinators, not tied to any specific implementation:

https://qntm.org/combinators
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quong_Wing_v_R
The Beer Giraffe Dispensers Around the Globe
I didn't think the "someone inferior" was elementary to it - the point to me always seemed to be to kill somebody innocent.
>I don't get why he is leaving the company that soon

Because he doesn't like it there.

>nor what it announces it on Twitter before getting a new job.

Because it's his Twitter and he has nothing much to hide. It's not like he wont find employment (actually it might be not like he even needs employment that badly -- he could easily have a couple of million in the bank).
Contractor in London here. I've seen this for Python / dev-ops as well, well more the aftermath since the contractors were usually already gone. But the level of incompetence was jarring for someone on 500 pounds per day (this was before Brexit).
I've been using it for heavy background job for http://thefeed.press and overall, I think it's pretty ok (I use NodeJs). That said here are few things:

- No straight way to prevent retries. (Retries can crazily increase your bill if something goes wrong)

- API gateway to Lambda can be better. (For one, Multipart form-data support for API gateway is a mess)

- (For NodeJs) I don't see why the node_modules folder should be uploaded. (Google cloud functions downloads the modules from the package.json)
The polling trigger is a fairly common pattern from what I've seen to keep it hot.
Perhaps it's enough that they know that a lot of people (pro-split etc) demanded them to be added?
I think it would be more fair to say he would discriminate based on perceived risk to himself. In this case, that risk is based on the sex of the person involved, but his argument can also include, for example, hiring someone with lesser qualifications, who is less likely to be promoted past him, over a more experienced candidate.

The more general point would be, be aware of the second order effects of changes you promote. For example, revocation of innocent-until-proven-guilty would almost certainly reduce the chances of people who have blown the whistle of being hired again, as they would present a much higher risk to prospective companies, regardless of whether their claims were true. The fact that they would blow the whistle at all would serve as a huge red flag.

Of course, I don't actually know the incidence of sexual harassment at workplaces, and have no idea whether false reports are even an issue. I strongly doubt they are, but I can somewhat understand male managers fear of them, given that they can ruin careers and marriages. As much as sexual harassment is a problem, I don't think assumption of guilt is an appropriate or long-term effective solution.
It sounds like he's talking about a different problem.
This is a problem with certification and regulation. What you're talking about is, "I'm bleeding and don't have time to drive to the next city over because it's cheaper." When that hospital purchased its gauze, sutures, and other equipment it wasn't under duress and theoretically could switch suppliers at any time.

Being intended for use on or inside a human body, we have higher expectations in quality and consistency. Unfortunately, these certifications can make the barrier to entry too high for good competition. Or they're locked into a supplier for whatever reason.
None of Kalanick's kinks is helpful to Uber. Don't promote this idea that it's good business to sexually harass you employees.
I would work on fixing those draconian laws before going after Twitch for letting kids blow off steam with their peers while watching games.
Samsung pays record ransom
I'd like to use Lambda@Edge to add headers to my CloudFront responses. Does anybody have any idea when this might be released from preview?
$1m digital ransom
But why? Is there any synergy between Apple and Uber?
I'm curious, do you mind sharing a bit about what it is you're working on?
Seems like a lot of hustle to me...
RDS always running was just recently fixed...

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2017/06/amazon-rd...
If streamers want to moderate chat some way, let
them do it

In a match between two world-class players, one of whom was putting all their attention on the game and one of whom was splitting their attention with chat moderation, wouldn't the guy who was concentrating win every time?
None of the accusations against Uber and Kalanick are about behaviour that is "good business" in any imaginable way. Uber gains nothing from sexually harassing its employees.

...and if that's a 21st Century thing, so be it.Maybe you should do 21st-century things like being a good guy, considering this is the 21st century.
I get that, and I'm certainly not disputing the huge amount of extra skills you gain throughout your career. But reversing a string is categorically not clever coding.
FYI you've used marginal utility incorrectly in this context. I think it would be better to say a low return.

"thus the marginal utility of a good or service is the change in the utility from an increase in the consumption of that good or service." [1]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_utility
Neither did I mention that. Why did you associate those two things?

Does 'highly demanding environment' == 'Harassment' to you? If yes then you have far bigger problems. Any demanding mission ever might be out of reach to you per your value system.

Work conditions, overall demands of productivity et al will be brutal. And that ultimately gets to cause all sorts of other problems. People who just can't catch up with all the rush ultimately feel discriminated.
Notably, you hardly ever need Monadic parser combinators. Applicative parser combinators work fine in almost all cases.

FastParse lets you use parser combinators monadically, but that's only necessary in uncommon cases. The three I've come across are length + data-of-length constructs (more common in binary parsing than text), having your parser validate matched XML tags/closing-tags, and indentation-delimited-block parser (e.g. when parsing Python).

For the vast majority of programming-language-like things, Applicative parser combinators are enough, including languages with complex syntax such as Scala.
When you introduce irrational events into a mostly rational world (i.e. when you introduce "believe before investigation" into a world run by financial compensation) then you're bound to have irrational responses, such as discrimination, yes.
Interesting story, thanks for sharing! I too started off with Linux back in the day - I'd been on minix-list for a few weeks after just getting a 386 and wanting something decent to run on it, replacing the Desqview configuration I'd been using previously. So I was quite happy to download Linus' little kernel and see what it could do .. one floppy at a time from funet.fi, lol. What a great impression it made - a real unix on a 386! Of course, the fact that it took a week to compile X/Windows wasn't that big a deal. :)

Then I moved on from building everything from scratch - a great learning experience back in the day - to Yggdrasil, which was simply a great distro for the time. Ah, good ol' days .. I really wonder what I'd do different if I had a time machine and could go back and tell myself all the things Linux would be used for in the decades ahead, it would have really blown my mind .. Still does!
Uber's business model reminds me of Zapp Brannigan.

Fry: "I heard one time you single-handedly defeated a horde of rampaging somethings in the something something system"

Brannigan: "Killbots? A trifle. It was simply a matter of outsmarting them."

Fry: "Wow, I never would've thought of that."

Brannigan: "You see, killbots have a preset kill limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men at them until they reached their limit and shut down. Kif, show them the medal I won."
1.0 and 0.7 will come out at the same time. The recommended upgrade path will be to run the application and tests under 0.7 and fix any deprecation warnings, then switch to 1.0 where those warnings will become errors and fix any you missed. Should be pretty straightforward and allows us to release 1.0 without any deprecations.
How Should Business Schools Prepare Students for Startups?
If you're losing money on every ride, then your aggregate profit on all rides will be in the negatives. More volume just makes the total loss bigger, because that's more money you've been giving away.
> Our main way of relating ourselves to others is like things relate themselves to things on the market. We want to exchange our own personality, or as one says sometimes, our "personality package", for something.

-- Erich Fromm ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu-7UDT0Xe4&t=1m34s )

> The danger of computers becoming like humans is not as great as the danger of humans becoming like computers.

-- Konrad Zuse

And when Picasso said that computers are useless because they only provide answers, was he just being witty, or pointing at an abyss, knowingly or not?
From the article:

"While roughly 1% of the US population is of the South Asian race and national origin, roughly 93%-94% of Infosys’s United States workforce is of the South Asian national origin (primarily Indian)."
Yeah. Also don't ask new employees for sex on their first day. Repeatedly.
As an Australian - I thought Uber's main appeal here was price. The taxi product experience, from everything I've heard, is far worse in the US than here.
Yeah that type is enough to make a monad. In slightly fancy language the type you just wrote is just StateT Input Maybe. Monadic mostly makes me think of bind which is just about chaining (technically also return is needed, but here return is just always succeed and give that value) and parsers have a natural notion of run one after the other.
Agreed regarding downloading of libraries. I tried to get a python torrent library working in lambda the other day, and I had to manually dig through my /usr/lib to find the right shared objects. Should be much easier than that, I should be able to place a language appropriate set of requirements in the zip root and it should do what it needs to do.
Why don't they run them themselves?
> I don't see why the node_modules folder should be uploaded.

Exactly! Especially if you're using modules that include some sort of binary and build your function on macOS it's a pain -- I ended up using a Docker-based workflow to get the correct binaries into the node_modules.
Sure, but the same can be said for almost all change. Driverless cars, solar panels(renewable energy in general actually), even windows updates! I don't think saying "we shouldn't do it because it will take too long" should be a valid excuse
While I agree that this is very common and that these basic skills are mandatory in any programmer, I don't think whiteboard interviews are helping very much.

How I like to hire new people is by working with them for an hour or part of the day. Just on one of the candidates toy projects. Within about few minutes you'll learn if this candidate is in fact a programmer. The rest of the time you can get to know the candidate a little better, learn a bit about how they work and how they think. And you don't put the pressure on them for coming up with solutions on the spot.
What do you mean by retries? Also, why would you upload node_modules? Why don't you build it first and only upload what is required...
Andrej Karpathy Leaves OpenAI for Tesla ('Director of AI and Autopilot Vision')
One of the benefit of SPARQL is that you can extract a subset of a given dataset as RDF. And can inject it into another RDF graph.

Eventually, you can build-up your dataset by picking subsets of other datasets, and link your own data graph with all that.

(The top of the top is to use SPARQL federated query, so you can do all that a query-time).

If you consider SPARQL as a way to implement REST API, it is the most flexible API a data producer can provide: you can run whatever query on my dataset, I force nothing.

What I see as a failure in the SPARQL ecosystem, it is the lack of SPARQL query repositories for all public datasets.

I tried to develop a tool for that (cf datao.net) but it never took off.
> with Google Sheets backend for privacy

Read it once again out loud, slowly.
If you're in the USA and keeping tabs of the controversies I think it is easy to overestimate Lyft and underestimate Uber.

Uber is in 100 more US cities than Lyft and 81 countries where Lyft isn't. I find that in large parts outside of the USA "Uber" is synonymous with ride sharing.

Uber bookings revenue is doubling each year[0], net revenue growth is outpacing growth in losses[1] and they claim to be profitable on a per-city basis in early markets[2]

Direct comparisons: Countries 82 (Uber) vs 1, Bookings: $20,000M (Uber) vs $1,400M, Growth: 100% (Uber) vs 250% (Lyft), Net revenue: $6,500M (Uber) vs 700M, Losses: $2,800M (Uber) vs $800M (Uber has much better margins and margin growth), Valuation: $70,000M (Uber) vs $6,000M, Revenue/Valuation: Uber 3.5x Lyft 4.28x

Not an insurmountable task, but Lyft have a long way to go and no track record or operations outside of the USA.

[0] http://fortune.com/2015/08/21/uber-bookings-double/

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-14/embattled...

[2] https://www.businessinsider.com.au/uber-profitable-in-hundre...
Human beings can not drive in all conditions in India.

Just to get our car out of the garage, I had to plead and negotiate with N vegetable vendors with makeshift stores on the road.

Also: bicycles, motorbikes, rickshaws(in human pulled, CNG and electric varieties!)and pedestrians mixed in traffic everywhere.
Kalanick is no Steve Jobs.

Steve Jobs was an asshole at times, but that behaviour was always about driving people hard to create what he considered a perfect product.

Kalanick's brohaviour has nothing to do with economic success. You absolutely do not need to harass people sexually to be successful.
...yeah.

Tipping < not tipping

Uber + not tipping > Lyft + tipping

Uber + tipping < Lyft + tipping
VR headset viewers 'barely turn their heads'
I only watch Twitch on Android TV (with their awful that decides to log you off periodically), but seriously, WTF Twitch ? Why block Chromecast ?

BTW, did you try any technical workaround?
Just one with bad plumbing.
Really?
https://help.twitch.tv/customer/portal/articles/1691460-chro...
I can see this potentially leading to a lot of poor ratings for riders who don't tip enough. And "enough" in cities like New York is IMO totally skewed..
I hope they implement it in a way that prevents this behavior; e.g. show aggregate tip stats to drivers, make tip amount visible only after rider rating.
Shame the whole planet is completely black until you zoom right in though.
Traditionally (for better or worse), prison inmates do not have the same rights/freedoms that everyone else does. For example, they usually don't get unsupervised calls and visits, and depending on their sentence, may not be able to take/make calls or accept visitors at all for a period of time. It's not a stretch to think that this SCOTUS decision is only related to people outside prison.
> I would not want to report to someone who spends the majority of time remote

Why? There is really little to no difference if person is in next cubicle or video chat away.
Does Lyft operate outside the US?
No no, you've got it a little bit backwards. Right now, the biggest profits for capital are in being bearish about Uber and shorting Uber. This is in the nature of amoral capitalist investment: all the right decisions are 'supporting and enabling Uber' right up to the point where the bubble of valuation pops and then the only right decisions are 'bailing and running away from Uber'.

Kalanick's right decisions are now based on how much he was lying when he said he hadn't divested the slightest bit from Uber. I'm guessing that everyone read his character well, and that he was in fact lying on a massive scale and has many lifetimes worth of stashed-away wealth. Right now, winning for him means avoiding prosecution and jail (probably easy to do) and Uber is over, already.

So Uber lost, and anyone still clinging to Uber has lost (but there will be amazingly few of those). It's the frog and scorpion fable, really. Travis isn't the scorpion, and Uber isn't the frog. Uber is the scorpion and Wall Street is the frog.
Secret gross things that all girls do
You're exactly right though, and that's the problem.

People won't pay to use the service if Uber charges what it actually costs to deliver it. They're heavily subsidizing each ride. When you pay for an Uber, they're basically giving investor money to the driver to cover your fare for you. Investors have been paying for your transportation over the past few years.

At some point, they have to actually make money, and the only way to do that is to raise prices. The issue is no one will stick with the app at higher prices. I've already abandoned Uber/Lyft/others for a $300 bike and a bus pass, because it's much cheaper and much healthier. If they double or triple their prices, which is about what they'd have to do just to break even, lots of people will be following suit.

The self-driving car game was supposed to save them, but I don't think they're guaranteed to win that fight. Tesla seems further along than anyone, and I have far more faith in Musk's ability and track record of executing than I do in Travis (or whatever committee is replacing him). Not to mention every automaker is working on self-driving cars right now to boot.

Uber has no guarantee they'll dominate that market, and considering they can't even break even in their current market, I see them as a ticking time bomb.
There are hundreds of books and policy documents detailing why. This is an utterly stupid question.
Made me laugh but it's a very true statement. When I was driving whilst holidaying in India I realised that the main rule of the road was "largest vehicle wins"! This actually made for quite an easy to understand system with few questions of whose right of way it was.

bike < car < van < truck

which makes sense because if you're the one who's going to come off worse in an impact then you really want to give way - especially if you have a massive painted tipper truck hurtling towards you!

It will be very interesting to see how self driving systems can cope with these local unwritten bylaws.
I'm using it for a year in a half, and I'm more than happy, The cost increments when you have much load, but I am a happy user to use it for these small applications that need to be always up.

Need to say, that you should use gordon<https://github.com/jorgebastida/gordon> to manage it, Gordon makes the process easier.

Regards
Uber obstructing justice with greyball program
That's why these local taxi companies usually have billboards at train stations and airports that inform travellers of their app.

EDIT: Alternatively, convince the taxi companies to open up their API. Then you can have one app that selects the correct API based on your current location.
How do teens pay for Uber rides? Surely children aren't eligible for credit cards in the US?
> In 2013, India’s second-largest IT firm took a $34 million hit—the largest ever payment in a visa case—after a Texas court found the behemoth guilty of “systemic visa fraud and abuse.”

> Green, the former global head of immigration who has previously spoken out about the detrimental effect of curbing H-1B visas on the US tech sector, is accusing Infosys of using the very same work visas to replace or supplant non-south Asians at the company.

This is probably one of the reasons why there's a lot of people in tech industry (other than CEOs) who want stricter immigration rules in the US.