skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I live in SF and am totally on your side - I think you're being punished for the existing firms' failure to think of this first. SFMTA is drastically overdue for reform.
Three points:

1. Sounds like UberCab should look into licensing out their platform to existing cab companies. It would mean lower margins, but they can quickly scale throughout the US and beyond much faster.

2. UberCab's blog post is arrogant. Did they really think they can avoid paying expensive licensing fees because they are using black cars instead of yellow cabs? Taxi licenses are very expensive and a lucrative revenue source for every major city. A taxi seat can cost as much as 1 million to purchase in NYC, and I know other cities such as SF and LV are not much cheaper due to the fixed number of licenses. I can only imagine the outrage of other cab drivers losing work to cheaper services (i.e. UberCab) because they are not paying licensing fees.

3. UberCab can easily recover albeit at lower margins. They need aggressive biz dev to quickly secure licenses. I hope they can continue to disrupt city transportation.
From my reading of his posts, Dave has great domain specific knowledge, but outside of that he tends give up quickly or jump to conclusions (see article as example)

He is one of the Ur-bloggers, having started Userland and been doing a blog-like site for 10+ years, and is often very insightful, but his blog seems to be written for an audience of 1, himself. If you go into it with other expectations, you'll probably be disappointed.

In short, don't rag on him - do go for perspective.

(this is probably my most meta HN post yet)
Food and Finance
This is just silly:

- meat eaters generally don't eat bacon and eggs for breakfast every day

- pescetarian's sandwich somehow crazily cheap compared to others

- pescetarian dinner has two salads; vegan's dinner is a strict subset of the vegetarian. The calorie count should be the same, at the very least
Not trying to sound like I am "Mr. Lawyer", but I did take a class on evidence this semester. But, more to the point:

If (s)he were to try and settle the dispute, it cannot be used against the defendant in court to prove negligence or wrongdoing. Ironically, this is so that people will be willing to settle disputes out of court, instead of clogging the court system with tons of suits.

So, giving the money back, in an attempt to settle the dispute, does not enable further suit.
Groupon Exposes Customer Emails In Google Results
Any new product is never better in all aspects, and usually can't yet fund the fleet of lobbyists that existing players have. Regulations are primarily a tool of established businesses which they wield like a sword when all else fails, kind of like lawsuits. And a disruptive newcomer which reduces municipal tax revenue is sure to be in the gunsights, because almost every new business can become "illegal" at a politician's whim. It's incumbents of both types (political and business) against the newcomer, except they aren't actually offering a better service but rather pointing a gun at the interloper.

Where is the statistical evidence that Ubercab and AirBnB are actually less safe than the alternative? Moreover, we let people choose to use motorbikes OR cars; why should the "less safe" alternative always be illegal? Sometimes other attributes (convenience, speed, price) mean that you'll settle for three rather than four nines in safety.
In the spirit of this thread I'll give some food for thought. The copy here [http://d.pr/Wixb] is a little hard to read because of the font's thinness in contrast to the background color. I'd bold it, or increase the size a small bit. The copy looks AOK to me in regards to content. Good Job!
I think lawyers usually draft agreements as "the parties agree that X is making a voluntary payment to Y and admits no wrongdoing" or suchlike in order to avoid that problem. Hopefully the submitter is having their communications reviewed by a lawyer in order to avoid glitches like that.
I have a few friends who still use the old practice in their libraries of rebinding books to have the same cover style & lettering.

Never understood it. I find something quite profound/exciting in a big bookshelf full of different sorts of books :)
Unfortunately this site doesn't accept my position. I keep getting the following:

You must mark a valid location on the Google Map.

I currently live in Bermuda and if there are any Go players out there traveling to or currently residing there I'd be down for a few games, I have a go board + stones.
I am sorry, but this is so convoluted and there is so much money is at stake that if you haven't hired a lawyer by now you are certifiably insane. A couple of things are for sure, you and your business partners were a) not equipped to detect/vet a loony b) were not able to handle them c) did an ask HN in a situation that obviously calls for a lawyer. I am sorry but you are seriously lacking business skills. After this is finished you need to either learn from your mistakes or better yet put out for, and vet very very carefully from multiple references and past performance, a serious business oriented partner because this rambling post with tens of thousands of dollars at stake just screams clueless.
This doesn't necessarily follow. It depends on the terms of the deal. The OP should talk to a lawyer.
I loved the city from day one! Let's see the winter :)
Ahh off course I agree 100%. Be on time whenever being late means wasting someone else's time. The rest of the time just get the job done.
I apologize for mistake, for a moment I thought 'pour' has a different meaning. English is not my native language and I lack some vocabulary esp. in non-tech area.

I meant: steep tea leafs in hot water for at most 3 minutes then take the leafs out.

This applies to tea bags as well, but better and more tasteful tea is when you buy a bigger bag of loose tea leafs
and use a metal tea-strainer. There are shops with specially crafted sets of leafs mixed together with some flavors from other herbs or flowers.
Get the most reputable lawyer you can find and afford (firm with known name) and force the other part into structured negotiations. Don't go to Hacker News for advice. Advice is worth nothing, proper procedure is everything. At this point you can easily make a mistake and become accountable.
Exercise can make you smarter, at any age
Ask HN: Professional Hacker's Web Presence?
What sites are key for the professional hacker? What is your public face?

How do you evaluate a candidate professional for employ/contract/partner/supplier online?
Is that a blanket rule for attempts-to-resolve-disputes, or does it only apply to negotiations after a lawsuit has been filed?
Rethinking the Multivitamin
In case OP runs out of cycles I'd suggest people try out http://wordspa.com I've had good experiences there in the past.
Ask HN:  Who is using Google Checkout for their product?
I've heard someone suggest using Google Checkout for a SaaS product. I've never heard of this before. Is anyone using Google Checkout for SaaS?
I think review systems will weed out the crappy, unclean places.

The best argument I've heard is the liability issue. Americans are sue-happy. One slip in the shower or bad car accident and then what?

Are AirBnB and UberCab totally immune from litigation?
That's a really nice application, but I think I still prefer Inkscape.
Pipes is a great way to transform RSS feeds into useful data. 400 data feeds from a site? Turns into 1, etc.
I lived in China during my childhood, and one of the things that I was involuntary involved in was playing Go, my parents simply made me do it. Despite the fact that I didn't really like it, I still kept learning it for several year. And by the time when I finally convinced my parents that I was not going to or even want to be a professional Go player, I was amateur 4 dan by Chinese standard, and I was about 10 years old. I stopped playing since then, but I can still pick it up and play once in a while, maybe with a skill level of around 2 dan I guess. Look back from now, Go looks interesting, but when I was forced to learn it at the age of 7, it was all boring and dull.
That's the main reason I don't even bother to look at AirBnB for the handful of cities where it's particularly bad (NYC and London mainly). If they made a better attempt to distinguish people genuinely renting out their own house/apartment from black-market businessmen running unlicensed hotels, I'd have much more confidence. For that matter, I'd like to be able to easily exclude licensed hotels too, some of which try to list themselves as if they were apartments for rent.
Ditto from me. I just got fed up with top x lists which seem to dominate the front page. I'm much happier on HN. I can't believe how fast these guys fell over such a short period of time. It's like they started asking people to pay money to view their content, rather than some pointless v4 upgrade.
What is a professional's web presence: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1827294
In my mind, a professional displays:

1. Discretion.

2. The quiet soft-spoken voice of reason (and incentive).

3. The weight of wisdom.

4. A higher sense of purpose other than being liked.

5. A way of saying much with few words (the "genius of compression").

6. The ability to discern between "the idea" and "the packaging".

7. A great fear of ever saying in private what they would never say in public.

8. An aversion to announcing things in advance.

Rather than being "on time", a professional seeks to be "before time". Rather than trying to "get to the point", the professional "starts with the point". A professional is more concerned with examining and testing and adjusting motives, than learning methods.

Above all, a professional gives value to "voice". The idea that playing a violin well will eventually result in greater resonance, that every note contributes to the tone of the instrument. The professional chooses to produce true notes as much as possible, knowing that false notes played in practice will eventually come to light in the character of the instrument. A professional understands why orchestra conductors insist on punctuality, the first and second and third order effects thereof. How "bottomless wonders spring from simple rules... repeated without end." - Benoit Mandelbrot.

Ask a professional why they chose to take a particular course of action, and they will be able to tell you "why". Professionals are rational, and their rationality is proactively forthcoming. Professionals phrase things in the positive.

Most of these characteristics seem to come down to "words" and "voice" and "reasons".
I actually think this is an awesome idea.

I'd just make a couple of small changes though. Instead of using space to start entering your password, I'd use the TAB key (as people are familiar with it). Then, to make it more obvious to the user the separation (and protection) of their password and user name, I'd put the password in a second text box and label it "password".

The benefit of this approach is that I think users would be comfortable with it, it works with all modern browsers (without JS) and I think it will be a fairly easy to change our existing forms to suit.
If that is the case, it probably deserve(s|d) a reason for support. "This." contains zero content aside from approval - functionally identical to the arrow, but at a much higher waste for everyone who encounters it.
Software Engineering Code of Ethics and Professional Practice:

http://www.acm.org/about/se-code
I've used it for some small scale distributed business apps. Latency isn't really a concern and the usage pretty much fits into the 'free' tier.

It saves having to worry about any other infrastructure -- these are desktop apps that need to access some shared state.

The .NET bindings provided by simplesavant.codeplex.com made it very easy to integrate.
Further specifying "good": you really need a lawyer who's seriously experienced in these kinds of matters, not just any lawyer. It makes all the difference.

Also remember that there's a lot a lawyer can do for you in a situation like this, way before a lawsuit is even on the horizon.
I was referring to all kinds of tea. After about three minutes of steeping the tannin, which neutralizes the effect of caffeine, gets into the liquid. Apart from that there are other substances, I don't know English translation atm, which also get into the liquid over time and they have more calming effect. Last but not least, the taste gets bitter over time. So it's best to steep at most that X minutes.

The preferred steeping times vary indeed for different kinds of tea. Wikipedia says 5-7 minutes for a white tea, well my experience is rather shorter, but it's also a matter of taste.
Food for thought, they signed a Non-Compete and NDA agreement. They can't directly compete with you and if they do you better sue them like your life depends on it. Also, as it was said by another poster, you are agreeing that you did something wrong, not legally I presume, but it certainly makes you look bad.

In any case. Get A Laywer
I like Reddit. It feels like a community, unlike Digg.
I've tried to make one of these life lessons explicit, answering a question on Reddit http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/c1fb7/hey_ratheism_...

How do you come to terms with death?

Learn to play Go. The game has an opening, a middle-game, and an end-game. You can take them as metaphors for the stages of life.

The opening involves playing in the corners and around the edges of the board, perhaps on the third line emphasising territory, or on the fourth line emphasing influence. Metaphorically this is childhood and education. Perhaps going for a vocational qualification, such accounting or law is like going for territory, while studying philosophy or travelling round the world is like going for influence. Or perhaps such direct parallels are over-literal. The opening moves in a game are worse than difficult; the opening is down-right mysterious. Which makes it a lot like growing up. And it creates a situation as you enter the middle game that is different in every game. Much as every adult has their own baggage left over from childhood.

Perhaps the middle game is like adult life because things keep going wrong. Your opponent invades your territory or steals the eyes from a group. You have to fight back, invade his territory or sacrifice a weak group. Adult life makes similiar demands on your flexibility and fighting spirit. If you lose your job perhaps you can find a new one with a rival company for more pay. Or change career and become happier.

The middle game may see victory or defeat, just as life may come to a premature end in illness or death. Often though one survives to the end game. The boundaries of the territories must be decided and there is still time for ingenuity and an upset. It is the time of memoirs and collected works, of playing with grand-children and of making partial amends for past errors.

If you play in tournaments there is a clock, but it is set to 1 hour, not seventy years. There is time to think about your opening, to estimate the score and plan a path in the middle game, to look for some clever moves and to save time here and there with the obvious safe play. After 40 minutes you can estimate the score again. If you think you are ahead you can try to hold onto your lead through the end game. If you think you are behind you must chose between trying to catch up with some clever end game moves or perhaps a do or die invasion. Time matters. If you are short of time you will be unlikely to be able to think for long enough to come up with clever moves. But you should be ahead, having put the time to good use earlier.

Tournament play with 1 hour instead of 70 years is the heart of the metaphor. Both the game and real life have a narrative arc and time limits. You have to manage your time and act your age, taking the big points in the opening and leaving the end-game moves for the end-game, if you make it that far.

So my advice is practical advice and not the uplifting advice that you requested. It emphasises the practical issue of getting the hang of managing a limited stock of time.
Check out MLB.com [Major League Baseball]. Streaming HD, live.
On "more pressing issues", I often visit the Shared Words project started by another HNer that lists the most shared news articles from mainstream news sites. I am always astounded at how often the top news items on US sites are saturated with stories about gay this, homosexual that. There are so many more intriguing and pressing issues in our world than what people get up to privately and (hopefully) legally with their genitalia!
Print version: http://www.businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/10_44/b42...
Have you read the YC application form?

"Please tell us in one or two sentences about something impressive other than this startup that each founder has built or achieved."

"Please tell us about the time you, philwelch, most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage."

"Please tell us about an interesting project, preferably outside of class or work, that two or more of you created together. Include urls if possible."

"How long have the founders known one another and how did you meet? Have any of the founders not met in person?"

"Please tell us something surprising or amusing that one of you has discovered. (The answer need not be related to your project.)"

The problem is that autobiography is awkward and weird to discuss. So while you may discuss ideas, that's probably so you have something less awkward to talk about in the process of feeling each other out as people. Discussing your ideas shows how you think and operate; telling someone how you think and operate is, OTOH, fraught with cognitive error and lies, since most people don't have an accurate self-image.
Is functional programming relevant to web development?
I had already learned to type qwerty a few years before taking my high school typing class. The first time that our teacher tested us, I was already typing over 60 WPM. By the end of the class, I was typing at 95 WPM, a good thirty WPM or so above the next student. Unfortunately, at the end of the class, my grade was 69.45 (70 was passing). The reason? Every week, the teacher required us to turn in a five page hand-written essay that we would type on Friday. I had originally learned to type because I hated hand-writing and I would turn the paper in typed and printed from my home computer (An Apple IIe). The teacher would give me a zero every week for not following the rules and I would argue with her that I was taking a typing class, not a penmanship class.

On the last day of class, before she turned in the grades, she offered to let me write an essay in exchange for 1 point. I decided practicality in this case was better than stubbornness and wrote the essay. I believe I chose a theme of practicality, stubbornness, compassion, and compromise.
Intellisense and debugging on one of the nicest IDEs around FOR FREE. Say what you want but Microsoft looks after developers.
Well all the 'young fliberdygibbits' who started with pets.com might not be successful by "your" definition, but majority of them might be very happy in their lives by their own standards.

There could very well be a cafe owner down the road who might exactly say the same thing about serendipity as PB did in this blog post. He could be happy with the choices he made in his lifetime and the chances he took that got him all that is good in his life (by his definition).

It all comes down to whether a person has a positive outlook or not. One can keep regretting the things that didn't work out, or choose to see the good things in his/her life.
I grabbed this PDF a few days ago: good stuff. Marc has done a remarkable job developing Gambit-C Scheme. I wrote an article for DevX on using Gambit-C for writing small natively compiled command line utilities, simple web services, etc.
Losing Perspective By Reaching A Tipping Point
guy = gender-neutral term for some people, as is 'dude'.
OP, Get a lawyer and sue for damages.
See also http://fsxplat.codeplex.com, which is a project with the aim to make F# a better tool for cross-platform development. I'm currently working on an (open source) MonoDevelop integration for F# (sources are already there), but an announcement is yet to come...
You need to get your users to flex their political muscles. Whether that is text messaging the politicians or what have you, put the fear of god into them and make them realize they'll have a political fight on their hands with thousands of angry citizens on your side.
>(a NYC medallion is worth over $300K)

$607,000 for individuals, $825,000 for corporate owners.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-08-06/nyc-taxi-medalli...

>a big fairness-of-competition issue which needs to be addressed.

I think it's transparently obvious that the sole purpose of these regulations is to prevent fairness of competition, to enforce an artificial scarcity that inflates the revenue of cartel members.

>If Ubercab is civil disobedience, taxi drivers can drive without licenses and claim that they are participating in civil disobedience.

Dare I ask, why not?
I was going off the article, I have no idea.

Anyway, I hope it's clear that I wish you the best of luck fighting this nonsense.
Acquisitions wouldn't be particularly surprising, if you ask me.
Los creadores de Google - Documental
The tip about using "--no-ff" for feature branch merges is really useful. Why ISN'T that the default.
I once read the marketing specs for some high-end specialized displays - I think air traffic control displays.

One feature: "Modular modules"
If you ever played in an orchestra with a great conductor, you would understand why things like punctuality are important.

In fact, it doesn't matter what the discipline is whether it be punctuality or something else, but the fact that discipline is valued. You might see these things in and of themselves as pointless (and you'd be right), but you'd be ignoring the 2nd and 3rd order effects.
Does anyone know if it is actually possible to use Yahoo! Pipes commercially?

I have always wanted to use Pipes, but unless I am misreading the Terms of Use (1.f.iv), it seems to suggest that you are not allowed to derive any income from any service that uses it.
i've given up on trying to get a cab in sf.

there's only 1381 highly regulated taxi medallions and a constant shortage. most potential customers have, just like me, given up on ever getting a cab when they need one, so there's not only artificially decreased supply, but also artificially decreased demand.

there's been extensive comparative research into taxi regulation for decades. the reason SF is so much worse even than other cities that restrict the amount of cabs, is that SF doesn't only regulate street pick-up but also dispatch.

google scholar is full of papers on taxi regulation research, and there's http://www.schallerconsult.com/taxi/ and other pages.

unsurprisingly deregulation is in the interest of the drivers because a competitive market increases customer demand. would you sometimes pay double the fare if you could get a cab _right now_, instead of waiting 25 minutes and praying? hell yeah, if only they let you!

let's hope uber can make on-demand transportation in SF usable again.