skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
London’s Transportation Regulator Won’t Renew Uber’s License to Operate
Anyone use a VR headset for dev work?
When it comes to development, for me, the more screen real estate, the better/more productive I am (to a point).

I was thinking, rather than a wall of monitors, some VR experience with a virtual desktop (with a screen as big as I want) would be the ultimate solution.

Does anything like this exist? Would it work?

I saw "Virtual Desktop" on Steam, but it just looks like a regular screen output within a VR "space". I suppose the limitation will be the maximum resolution your GPU can output. Has anyone tried/experimented with this?
We consulted two eCommerce companies into dropping Safari support as such.

During AB tests, sales actually went up
This is akin to suggesting that learning Java could be simplified by making its type system optional. Also, if one could turn off safety features, why would they ever switch them back on? They learned a different language, one where those checks are not present.
This Startup Is Making Virtual People Who Look and Act Impossibly Real
Thanks for great article, I found some good ideas how to optimise my workflow. I think everyone should spend some time adopting these techniques, instead of relying on "autopilot" mode.

Here's my mindmap of this article if anyone is interested: https://imgur.com/a/RnRgV
Well, I can't disagree with the reasons, but as someone who lives outside the M25 this means I lose a really handy way to get home when I've had a drink. Ah well, I'm supposed to have given up anyway :-)
Most Orgs Worried Skills Gap Will Leave Them Exposed to Security Flaws
I actually wrote the link title differently, as I didn't like the clickbait question mark. It was edited by a mod, to be the actual title of the video which is fair, but I can see why it would irk you!
Uber London licence not renewed
In Germany I usually drink water from the tap, whenever in the US[1] tap water is so full of Chlorine I can't get near it. Even more repulsive when Coke smells heavily of Chlorine.

[1] I only have east and west coast experience
Credit Assignment in Deep Learning – Tim Dettmers
It's possible to irradiate food at such high levels so as to degrade the nutritional value but it will never become radioactive itself. Over 60 countries use low level radiation to sterilize food.
Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook will release Russia ads to investigators
Uber has been stripped of its licence in London
email me at my username @ growthpub dot com
Can you query an elasticsearch instance in this way? i.e. as an alternative/complement to kibana?
I think the best way is how HN is. In fact, I wish more websites had this text only approach. Came across this fantastic redesign of a conceptual text-only TechCrunch: https://hackernoon.com/redesigning-techcrunch-1ecae542e6af

Somebody please make that!
> The most comprehensive data set with over a half a billion profiles of people and companies
Badger vs. LMDB vs. BoltDB: Benchmarking Key-Value Databases in Go – Dgraph Blog
Would the sinks still be segregated? or installed inside toilet cubicles?

> So, you are open to hearing these arguments, but out of hand dismissing my solutions.

What do you mean? What "out of hand dismissing"?

> But it isn't some big burden for most people the way it is for trans people. Trans people are a little bit like platypuses: they defy our established categories and don't readily fit our little boxes

Are many (pre or none op) trans-women refused entry to male toilets? The controversies I hear are of the opposite nature.

> If someone is successfully passing for female socially and not trying to sleep with me, I gives a damn what bits are between their legs

Again - why are bathrooms segregated in the first place?

If it's to protected women from predatory men, is the suggestion that trans-women are not predatory?

> Most people are not actually comfortable..

This doesn't answer the question though. Why are toilets not totally segregated within the same sex already?
>I have yet to see a "Visual" programming environment that is even close to as efficient as normal programming.

There are more than just programmers on modern game projects. I imagine visual scripting is an enormous boon to teams because a designer or someone who makes rules isn't blocked on a programmer implementing those rules. The non-programmer can get the basics down in the visual scripting tool, then the programmer can finish it and tighten it up. I'd love a tool like this in web development that let PM/BAs get started writing test cases they could hand off to me, for example. (I'm aware that tools like this do exist, was trying to be illustrative)
So, what does this actually mean? Will Uber not be able to operate in London, or will it just not be sanctioned by TFL?
I don't understand why Uber can't get their shit together. In the US they have competition from Lyft and I can almost understand why they have to push the boundaries. In London they have very little competition and therefore don't need to engage is controversial business practices. Personally I don't see what my alternative will be if their service ceases, they have that little competition.

Although I am kind of annoyed at the decision it's understandable. I hope with Kalanick out Uber will quickly become a better corporate citizen and get this license renewed.

NB: I'm aware of black cabs, Hailo, etc. but none of these are as convenient or cost effective as Uber. I can see the night tube getting a lot more use but I know quite a few people who don't like to take it after having more than a few drinks for safety reasons.
F# is a superset of OCaml, one can program OCaml in F#, sorta [1][2].

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4239121/code-compatibili...

[2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/179492/f-changes-to-ocam...
The same crowd also appear to be the ones worried about voter fraud, so they're consistency has limits.
I'm claiming that we should have the right to tell one of the three credit reporting agencies to get bent and delete our file if they're Equifax in October of 2017. That's not the same thing as "delete the record of debts I don't want to pay." That's completely disingenuous of you to suggest that's what I meant.

There are three credit reporting agencies. Can you tell me why there aren't more? Because from everything I can tell, there is nothing short of purely criminal activity that could actually result in Equifax being required to go out of business. It seems that no amount of negligent behavior on their part can give me the right to say "cease and desist your retention of my record," while I've never so much as signed a document that came from Equifax. I have no direct relationship with them, and I have the right to get a restraining order if a malicious stalker is all up in my shit, so how is this situation any different? What makes them the authority? Because credit banks do business with them? That's nice... I want them out of business! In Europe, I would have this right. Nobody could maintain a file on me that I can't get a legal order for them to delete.

I'm not talking about debt holders. I'm talking about this parasitic company that evidently has no security team, or has chronically underfunded it to the point that we get where we are now, or had simply disregarded their advice umpteen times _after_ it became clear that the situation was very dire.

The struts vulnerability was disclosed months before they patched it. Any security researcher worth a dime could have told them it was a mistake to put up that equifaxsecurity2017 site that was literally (so much that their own Twitter account linked to it 9 times) indistinguishable from a phishing website and make the only way to know it was legit, a link from the front page of Equifax.com.

How did they get such a great gift from the law, if such is true then sign me up to be a credit reporting agency! I know how to build crappy websites and persist database records, it seems I meet all of the non-existent licencing requirements to be a CRA.
Supposedly they can't operate legally after 30th Sept unless some temporary transitional agreement is put in place.
My First REAL Motorbiking Experience
Addison Lee are no better.

In many ways they are much worse. Their own corporate policies and their CEO encouraged drivers to use bus lanes, to ignore cycle super highways (to drive on them), to ignore all parking and stopping restrictions - if fines were issued the company paid for them to encourage drivers to carry on doing so in protest of not having the same access as black cabs (who in return for their training and being regulated to be accessible, etc are granted access to bus lanes and other stopping locations to ensure that accessibility can be fulfilled).

They also fell foul of using drivers without performing full background checks, etc. And their drivers are reasonably famed for not knowing where they are going (at least Uber technology saves their drivers from needing to know anything about London).
Some existing discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15310631
That was a clear explanation. Thanks. :D
Uber will appeal no doubt and probably promise to sort out their problems, say they are reforming etc.. and then get the license back
micro.mu really looks interesting.
Event: Ask Me Anything with Facebook's Product Manager
The MongoDB Atlas service is really good. You guys should try it.
One thing to note is that Addison Lee minicabs are notorious for their dangerous driving and ability to get away with injuring people. Especially cyclists.

This measure of protection is not afforded to uber drivers, nor are they encouraged to drive illegally by their company.

http://road.cc/content/news/56878-tfl-warns-it-will-take-act...
This really was not the main thrust of my question. It is completely obvious that the developers, or anyone else contributing can work on any aspect they choose. I am far more interested in a discussion about the merits of a Visual Scripting approach.

I should probably have worded my comment better and have added a small addendum.
I cannot understand why you need a license to ride other people from A to B...
As someone on HN pointed out recently, there’s a much better explanation for the tulip bubble than “speculators went crazy all of the sudden”.

In a 2007 paper, Earl Thompson argues that the extreme tulip bubble was formed because the Dutch government, in coalition with insolvent tulip speculators, allowed speculators to nullify tulip futures contracts, thus inadvertently enabling close-to-risk-free speculation in tulip futures (which, after the regulation, resembled options contracts to a much higher degree).

Here’s an Economist article on the subject: https://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/10/economi...

And Wikipedia has a summary here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania#Legal_changes
Full details:
https://twitter.com/BBCBreaking/status/911175207871762432

Criteria failed on:

1) Criminal reporting

2) Medical certificates

3) something about DBS checks

4) Use of Greyball to identify and block regulators.

Edit: Updated to new tweet.. they deleted the original
for the same reason you need a license to drive: regulations.
I'm generally up between 4:45 and 5am during the week. I either go to the gym or work on one of my side projects before work (or go through HN like today). Around 730am I'll shower and take the train to work.

On the weekend I often go out with friends until 1 or 2am. I'll naturally get up around 5am, but I'll just get a glass of water and go back to sleep until 9am.

Admittedly, I do go to bed very early during the week. I'm often in bed by 8pm and usually read for an hour. I try to be asleep by 930pm. If I have a date or meet friends for drinks during the week, it does throw things off.
Actually, I was part of a team that built a GPS based walking navigation system for the blind (Google Microsoft Cities Unlocked). The limits of 5m accuracy were an incredible danger that prevented us from doing any u assisted trials.

Even highly trained and skilled cane users would wander into the roadway usually within 10-15 minutes of using the system, purely because of GPS drift. And forget about ever using it in urban centers. In London, Boston and NYC it was rare to be more accurate than 50-100m. It's scary how bad GPS accuracy really is.
Currently, not including the upcoming 3.0 release, it’s their own flavor called GDScript. http://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/about/faq.html
http://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/learning/scripting/gds...

Edit: it’s worth noting some of the hard stances they have in that faq have changed since then. 3.0 (coming soon) has C# support.
Show HN: Producthunt Pointmp3
The significant majority of jobs are not those with considerable non cash benefits, so I don’t think it’s worthy of much discussions. It’s well known there is an increasing income and wealth gap, and it’s the increasing portion of those with non benefit jobs that is problematic.
That is my understanding: yes, it would be safe to eat those apples. Also, yes, it would be perfectly safe to eat apples that were exposed to x-rays for one year. X-rays are not powerful enough to split atoms, so if the apple started out by not having unstable (i.e. radioactive) atoms, it will end up the same. Some molecules in the apple will split, but not the atoms themselves.

The story would be different if you exposed the apple to neutron bombardment. During a nuclear explosion, a lot of neutrons are released, but the intensity of the neutron bombardment decreases with the square of the radius, so if you are far enough for the apples to not be physically destroyed, they'll most likely be safe to eat.
Iteration Inside and Out (2013)
Big news. I'm sure there's a few parties working to make this happen and Uber sure doesn't help themselves with the way they act. I suspect there'll be enough community backlash along with very good lawyers working to get this fixed very quickly. I suppose if it doesn't get solved it could be the first of a series of moves that take out Uber. I bet there's a lot of cities looking at this. Personally, I really don't want to have to use my local taxis and love the alternative whether it's called Uber or not.
> I don't have to deal with database migrations

We've actually just started having the pain of Mongo migrations; adding indexes to large collections. If you just create the index on the primary and let it propagate throughout the cluster, then it will block further oplog replication on the secondaries and the whole cluster will go down for majority writes. The proper way is to take each secondary out of the cluster in turn, add the index, then step-down the primary and migrate it.

It's just as much of a pain as migrating your favourite SQL database, although at least you don't need to do it for small collections and for adding columns (which is a big bonus).
Iteration Inside and Out, Part 2 (2013)
Even if you personally don't need or use the system today maybe it can be useful for you in the future.
What's Lyft like here in London? I just downloaded it, much use?
Right, and some people will work in C, while others will work in Python. That doesn't quite line up with a "grade level", but I agree that different writing styles (or languages) suit different purposes best.

But I assure you, our computers would "think" that we are all idiots for using just about any high level language feature. We write things in loops (computer unrolls it), we give variables readable names so we can think about them (computer assigns it a memory address instead), and we build meaningful abstractions (computer sighs and turns it into meaningless 1s and 0s). So literally all high level languages are written for us feeble-minded HUMANS! Not for computers.
Enough for what ? Eating ? Maintaining a family house that is not residence of your children anymore ? Having a car ? Covering additional health expenses ?
AMD Copilots Tesla AI Chip, Says Report
Is there much value in "the knowledge" anymore, given the existence of GPS, phones, and map apps with real time traffic and accident information?
Quite strange this was posted considering it was just announced the license will not be renewed further. [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15310664
Does that mean Uber can't operate in London?
If the environment is stable enough, a bubble doesn't necessarily have to pop.

I think that chronic sustained wealth inequality can create lasting economic bubbles that never pop.

If we lived in a world where everyone had near infinite resources, everything would be a bubble because markets would be driven entirely by status value.

If you think about it, the rich today have practically unlimited wealth thanks to dividends, rent payments and/or interest; they can afford to lose large portions of their income and still become richer.

Now thanks in part to social media, the rich live in a separate world from others; one which has near unlimited resources. So long as money flows into their world faster than it leaks out, bubbles are completely sustainable.
Trade (YC W17) is hiring! We're building a commodity exchange in Ghana!
Looks related to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15164166
Similarly, families who pay for their aged parents and grandparents to live in assisted or medical facilities, or their own apartments, don't get back anywhere near the amounts that they put in.
Yes - that is exactly what it means.
When I have reported black cab drivers misleading passengers, lying about pricing and regulations or bus drivers driving dangerously and being rude to everyone, TfL are totally uninterested. They give the impression that they know the scams operate and don't care. It's an interesting comparison with my Uber experience, which has been almost flawless and issues are usually fixed by Uber themselves promptly.
But there is a license for that: a driving license. And the one which is given allows to drive a car with passengers inside. It should be enough...
AFAIK it isn't available in London.[1]

[1] https://www.lyft.com/cities
That gives a 404.
>'forM' means what, exactly? Nothing. It means nothing until you apply it to a particular monad.

It means you're mapping over something and collecting the results. Yes you need a little more information to understand exactly what you're mapping over or what "collect" means in this context, but this is still more information that `for` gives you without reading more.

Although I find in practice it's usually fairly obvious what `forM` means in context, because you're likely writing a lot of code working with the same monads.

>they're notated right there as algebraic effects.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Unless you're using some kind of advanced imperative language with effect types, they're not "right there", you have to infer them from the code.

Whereas with Haskell you usually have a type signature which tells you what the effects are.
With several components we're building in Go I have to say I don't see it stopping us from being too clever, too complex, and too verbose. In fact the workarounds to just get some things done without having a whole lot of duplication are fairly annoying. `go vet` with the strictest settings should probably the default if that was actually the goal.
> They have 21 days to appeal and can keep operating until the appeal process itself finishes (Oct 13th then).

The 21 days is how long (from now) they have to begin the appeal:-

"The Private Hire Vehicles (London) Act 1998 includes provision to appeal a licensing decision within 21 days of it being communicated to the applicant. Uber London Limited can continue to operate until any appeal processes have been exhausted."

[In that press release] There is no specified time limit on the length of the appeal.
Is this the first domino? Will France (and other European countries) then turn around and say, ah oui we too don't think Uber is fit to operate.

Uber is pretty crappy in London, I had one the other night and the guy wasn't even the guy who's picture was on the app (yes the driver did not match the registered uber driver). This is before we even get onto the fact that he didn't know where he was going.
Looks like they deleted the tweet.
tl;dr No. Google Maps is as-good as the knowledge or better.

Hailo allegedly did a piece of research to try and prove that black cabs were better than a private hire vehicle using Google Maps as Hailo had both at the time and had the data to compare.

The point of this was to enable a marketing campaign to sell Hailo for hailing black cabs because bus lane access and the knowledge meant that black cabs would be faster, etc.

But in reality, all they discovered was that for 99% of the time Google Maps was as good as, if not better than, the black cab.

Only in certain parts of London, at the worst of a rush hour or around some sporting event that has fouled up an area... does the black cab come out better by a small fraction, for a short window of time.

Google Maps is for all intents and purposes on par with a black cab and the knowledge.
You're right in that JDK 9 highly values backward compatibility with JDK 8. However, there are still some caveats because of modularization of the JDK, that can affect your code (or your libraries) even when running on the classpath without modules:

- some Java EE technologies that are tradionally part of Java SE as well, won't resolve by default when compiling/running on the classpath (JAXB will be the most noticeable)

- JDK 9 strongly encapsulation internal implementation classes (think of types in com.sun.* and sun.* packages). When running on the classpath, there's a lenient form of strong encapsulation: you will get a warning on the console when reflectively using these types. In time, this lenient mode will be switched to a more strict enforcement. Ergo: time to wean code off the dependencies on internal implementation classes

The first restriction you'll probably run into (if you for example have a Spring application). The second restriction is more an issue for library maintainers (though you should start complaining to said maintainers if your application starts printing warnings)

All in all, it's not a 100% drop-in replacement, but it's close enough for most scenarios. The trick is to make sure your application will keep running in the future as well, when a more strict strong encapsulation regime will be enforced for classpath-applications as well.

(full disclosure: I'm author of Java 9 Modularity, O'Reilly, which covers many migrations scenarios as well. See https://javamodularity.com)
There's a difference between driving another person from A to B and charging that person. As a comparison you can invite a friend to your house and cook for them. If you start charging people for that there will be food safety regulations etc. you need to comply with.
I worked in nuclear plant operations for over 25 years and have never seen an iodine pill.
I wish there were a way to display news from a custom time interval, as opposed to always getting news from a fixed interval of time (I think there are three different settings as of now).

If I haven’t visited HN for, say, 6 days, I find it’d be really helpful to be able to display all news from this time period, based on number of upvotes in descending order.

In other words: I’d appreciate complete control over the algorithm that decides which news to display: time interval, minimum upvotes, minimum comment count, upvotes-per-hour, etc.
This is after the original (5 year) renewal in May 2017 was not granted and they only got a 4-month extension which expires Sept 30th.

So Uber have been on-notice since May that they need to comply with the regulator's requirements for an operators license and haven't done so.