skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Um, seriously?

Uber is dropping their fares only for the duration of the taxi strike, ostensibly to make sure "ordinary folks can get around the city while the taxi drivers strike to get a fair deal."

During the strike (viz., the 'short term') there will likely be a shortage of cars, including uber cars. Lowering their prices will only make it harder to get an uber car during the strike.
> Who are these people?

People embarrassed to pull out a huge 10" screen to read in a train.
Wait, there are hammock stands? Thank you. Purchasing one right away.
A regional bank in New England recently prevailed with exactly that argument in court.
I disagree with this. "Sexy" can get you in the door, but only if you actually solve some need (perhaps not yet known) can you develop market share. If the iPad had only sold 240K machines the first year then you'd say "Its just a sexy device without solving a real problem." But it did much more than that.

So you go back and ask "What was it?"

And that is what market research is all about.

I don't know, I've not surveyed thousands of iPad owners why they bought, how much they use now, if they would upgrade, so I can only go by the limited exposure to friends, family, and various hacker types.

The itch it seemed to scratch, which was un-met by the 'touch' was "instant on access to email and web."

The 'conventional' wisdom was that this "wasn't enough" to justify a $500 - $900 purchase. Or a laptop would be the answer. Apparently the wisdom was wrong.

There are other things it does of course, and more all the time. I got into a fierce one sided debate inside Google where I was advocating e-readers were important and being countered with "your stupid, I can do that on my phone, no one will buy an e-reader who isn't stupid." (Almost word for word, seriously) You can't see what you can't see.

So while I agree that a strong brand can sell stuff which isn't useful, developing beyond the afficiandos takes actual value which the iPad (and tablets) seem to have.
> could I get the same amount of rest in less time?

I'm dubious of anything that claims to pull this off. My own failed attempts have convinced me that sleep is not something that can be lifehacked. There is some variation in sleep requirements between individuals, but you and I each have a number (probably ~8 hours) below which our bodies start getting cranky. There are loads of studies showing that any form of sleep deprivation -- and I would include here trying to optimize down your overall sleep time -- has reliable, long term negative consequences. What's more, there seems to be an unusual level of consensus on this subject. (I say 'unusual' because medical researchers never agree on anything. :-)
John von Neumann once told a confused young scientist, "Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them."

I don't think that's quite true, but developing familiarity with a difficult concept is tantamount to coming to understand it, in my experience.

For me, the process seems to go like this:

1) assemble the disparate pieces of a concept, and try to wrap my head around the novel ones;

2) work out how Piece A relates to B, and B to C, and ... ;

3) forget what the hell Piece X is;

4) repeat steps 1–4 several times;

5) convince myself that all the pieces work together as they should.

And only later, after I've worked with this collection of pieces several times, do I stop seeing the pieces and start seeing something new, the emergent phenomenon of the new concept. And it's not until I've forgotten the details of how Piece X fits into Piece Y, and maybe why we need Piece Z in the first place, that I feel like I really grok this new concept.
'Scabs'? The taxi firms have bent over backward to keep competition out of the market, and now you're saying they should get solidarity because they want to hold consumers hostage to their monopolistic demands? Consumers who already pay more for their cabs than in any other US city?
R.I.P. his columns were always the best part of any EDN issue.
What happened here is just natural selfishness: the person that executed this buy order knew that the market was crashing, and that something was going wrong, but decided to exploit it regardless.

All others moaning about what he did who bid at 0.1 weren't?
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My experience with MongoDB has been great! Covered in detail here:
http://www.theroadtosiliconvalley.com/technology/mongodb-mon...
I've always wondered about this. The real expenses are disk space and bandwidth. I don't understand how they can't just provide a space-based plan (oh yeah, that would cut into high margins).

It's a wonderful service and they've done so much to keep many open source projects from stagnating. They outshine SourceForge and Google Code by a large margin. Still, if BitBucket was git, I might migrate my stuff.

The thing is "social coding" isn't that big of a plus for your own private stuff. I definitely see value in a service like this.
I don't know. I imagine there is a body of caselaw dealing with these rules in the context of financial instruments and currency trading that would give more detailed tests.
I think a better measure of understanding is how well you are able to explain it to a layperson. As Einstein once said, "If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself."

As a researcher, who has also TAed classes, it takes a lot of effort not only to teach a particular topic, but also simultaneously present the crux of the idea as well as the right way to think about it and its place in the context of other information. And learning to think about everything with these in mind will make you understand things much much better. In particular, one of the most challenging things is not to explain breakthrough ideas to cutting-edge researchers but rather explaining breakthrough ideas to complete outsiders and laypeople.
Being an intern at Acquia
I often wonder how developers are actually able to develop without being able to throw together the entire stack they use without following a detailed tutorial.
Survey: Who Wants a Tablet? Gimme an iPad
The biggest thing is just listing off all the many things you have to do to send email in any real way on your own. All the DNS settings, various schemes to verify you are who say you are, potentially dealing with getting blacklisted due to spam complaints, etc. If I were you guys I'd have page that was a big list of hassles of running your own mail server and give people that. That, and the ease of using one of the libraries and plugins available (I'm using the grails plugin) make it an easy choice.
I own one. I'm surprised you haven't noticed the lag when trying javascript intense sites (like games). Here are the iPad Nitro Sunspider results: 2121ms vs. Chrome 11: 248ms. That would make Mobile Safari javascript 8x slower than desktop Chrome (other desktop browsers have similar speeds).

[1] http://www.electronista.com/articles/11/03/03/ipad.2.4x.fast...
[2] http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/benchmarks/sunspider/Table...
Yeah, I read that Dijkstra paper a while back, I was even considering mentioning it somewhere in my comment, but lost the energy to do so due to the time.

As for formal logic being used in programming languages, while that is true, I am not sure that is what the author was referring to when mentioning "advanced mathematics". Maybe it was because he mentioned calculus early on and that somehow threw me off course, or maybe because I myself wouldn't look at it as something "advanced". Don't know, truthfully, I have no idea what he meant by "advanced mathematics", so I wont deny that it could have been formal logic.

Anyway, I see the point about DSLs and how they could be helpful to the common individual who doesn't want to devote so much of his or her life to mastering an all purpose language. I suppose that's great if you can actually accomplish everything you want that way, but in practice I feel like it would only get a person so far before they were out of options while still needing more. I always looked at DSLs as conveniences and extras to simplify the parts of the problem you don't care to fully concern yourself with. Beyond that scope though, it seems that an all purpose language is still going to be required for the non trivial aspects of coming to a solution, and to also glue all the trivial DSL components together. But hey, we should take any help we can get.
Einstein may have said that but it's just not true. How do you explain the Higgs boson to a six-year-old? If you succeed, it's because you made an analogy so simple that it has no meaning.
I was going to post nearly the same thing. It may upset the strikers, but it's a brilliant business move by Uber to snag some customers that may not have given it a shot otherwise, and turn them into repeat users.
As Galileo said, "All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them." Insights are often so simple, so obviously true once you see them. But we are often blinded by our fixations, our hubris, our limited frames of reference -- our narrow perspectives -- which prevent us from seeing.
Doubt that'd be worth the effort/storage, even in the case of a weak, unsalted hash like MD5.

Take N to be 10, assume 7 bits per character. Then all 10-character passwords fill no more than 2^70 of the 2^128 MD5 space. Any 11-or-larger character password then has a less than 1-in-2^58 chance of colliding with any shorter password. (That's how much larger the full space is, from which each longer-password hash will be drawn.) That's 1-in-288-quadrillion for us decimal apes.

The service would probably never deliver a useful warning before MD5 falls completely to a preimage attack.

The analysis for such a service only gets harsher for 160/256/512 bit hashes.
The exchange does seem to go against the primary purpose of the currency.
Arash, man, I don't know you, but I think it's totally badass that you guys apparently deploy code on Sunday afternoons. This was a pretty terrible oversight, but whatever your 'safeguards' are, don't do silly things like "only production releases on Wednesdays" or all the usual things that add up and cause a company to shrivel into a petrified husk.
Yes, I found that assertion to be ridiculous as well.

Hardware has changed radically. Old tablets had battery life of 3 hours, new tablets 8-10 hours. Old tablets weighed 4lb, new tablets 1lb. Old tablets needed a stylus or used poor resistive single touch screens. New tablets use responsive multitouch screens. Old tablets were dependent on wifi and did not have GPS. New tablets can have constant connectivity and can include awesome location based services. Old tablets cost ~$1k or more. New tablets cost < $500. Old tablets mostly ran Windows that was relatively poorly adapted to tablets. New tablets run beautiful dedicated tablet OSes.

There's just no comparison at all between these products, there's no way you can just make an assertion about the market for them being the same.
Homeland Security doesn't "go after" copyright infringement.

DHS is a cobbled-together afterthought, the bureaucratic equivalent of Mr. Oogey-Boogey from Nightmare Before Christmas, a writhing collection of squiggley little agencies held together with stitched up burlap, created as a slapdash response to 9/11.

One of those agencies is ICE, the (small) organization originally chartered with transcontinental IP enforcement.

The part of our government that is supposed to enforce organized criminal infringement of IP is enforcing infringement of IP. It seems silly to get upset that they're doing so under the banner of "DHS". You'd rather it was DOJ? They'd be doing more than seizing domains.
13-Year-Old Password Security Bug Fixed [crypt_blowfish, ergo PHP et al.]
I was going to point out that, ironically, many people who think something is "just obvious" completely fail to understand it at all.

So yes it cuts both ways.
I can look at code and say, "ah, Alan Perlis, you were right when I read your advice when I was 11 years old, but did not understand your wisdom [1]":

10. Get into a rut early: Do the same process the same way. Accumulate idioms. Standardize. The only difference(!) between Shakespeare and you was the size of his idiom list - not the size of his vocabulary.

[1] http://www.cs.yale.edu/quotes.html
The entire #3 really hits home for me. A couple weeks ago I started using New Relic and was just horrified by how bad my code had degenerated over the last 2 years... all those changes you make do have a cost, and in hindsight "it's fast for me" does not necessarily extend to others.

I've always looked at scaling Playtomic to involve the crapton [1] of data we're processing every minute of every day - cause that's obviously where the "real work" is, handling a huge stream of data that needs processing. It turned out the web interface for heavier users was ridiculous [2], heavier users with dozens of games had in extreme cases double-digit seconds on some of the stuff which is just embarrassing.

In the last couple weeks I've reduced our main server (we're still ghetto so it's database + web) cpu usage from 80% down to ~20% and made staggering improvements on the speed of reports - down to xx milliseconds in most cases, from some really ugly times [3].

[1] http://playtomic.com/blog/post/64-whats-in-a-minute

[2] http://playtomic.com/blog/post/62-scaling-the-user-side-of-p...

[3] http://i.imgur.com/bdUG4.png
It would be lovely if this were true, but I think it's actually a fairly poisonous mindset. What the author's post seems actually to be saying, with which I heartily agree, is “obviousness is only in hindsight”; deep things become trivial only because of the time you've put into understanding them.

On the other hand, I think the things that become obvious once you've understood them tend to be (though are not always) the things that have already been fairly well digested by others, and so are presented to you in a smooth, flowing way to which you just have to accustom yourself.

My experience with (mathematical) research is that understanding has a roughly equal possibility of meaning that you find it trivial, or that you finally understand all the (apparently) irreducibly complex difficulties. Indeed, my feeling if anyone tells me that, say, Deligne–Lusztig representations are obvious is that he or she hasn't probably fully understood them (disclaimer: neither have I, not even close, which may mean that I'm just illustrating the author's point).

I don't mean at all by this that you shouldn't go on searching for the 'obvious' simplification—that way lies great insight. (As someone said much more elegantly, if things aren't already obvious in mathematics, we tend to make them obvious by changing the definitions.) What I mean is that you shouldn't drag yourself down by saying “I thought I understood that, but it's hard, not obvious!”
Fuck the unions. They've half bankrupted the city already and are well on their way to completing the job. Uber does not owe the medallion owners a damn thing, and neither do the people of SF. They've made out like bandits for years by keeping the market deliberately undersupplied and inflating prices. Now we have the most expensive cabs in the US and you can't hail one outside of downtown for love or money. It's hard to get cab in the downtown area. I have no sympathy.
This is an amazing photo-essay on some of the legacy of Chernobyl.

http://inmotion.magnumphotos.com/essay/chernobyl

If you can point me at a similar legacy of birth defects suffering and eviction from the land, tied to the BP spill, please do so.

I'm not belittling the terrible effects on the Gulf of Mexico, but for people on land, I'm not sure I'd quite put it in the Chernobyl league.
Club Penguin Goes Down After Disney Fails To Renew Domain Name
Everyday we add more and more stunning properties to our inventory
IIRC from the last dropbox security fiasco, they also have to revoke the magic cookies that permit access without a password.
"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." -- Albert Einstein
Would you be surprised to hear that ForEx (the method of exchanging currencies like the USD, EURO, and YEN) are also unregulated?

"Unlike stocks, futures or options, currency trading does not take place on a regulated exchange. It is not controlled by any central governing body, there are no clearing houses to guarantee the trades and there is no arbitration panel to adjudicate disputes. All members trade with each other based on credit agreements. Essentially, business in the largest, most liquid market in the world depends on nothing more than a metaphorical handshake."

- http://www.investopedia.com/articles/forex/06/SevenFXFAQs.as...
...And that is the difference between a (good) teacher and a researcher who is conscripted into teaching.

A (good) teacher looks at a problem from as many aspects as possible and works with students to understand them. A (good) teacher collects multiple ways to understand a concept, so if one doesn't sink in, the next may. It's not an inborn skill; it takes practice.

The best way I've ever seen limits explained, incidentally, is taking a student 10 feet away from a wall. Ask the student to go half way to the wall. Then again. Then again. Eventually, the student is taking centimeter steps. Ask the student if he's at the wall. The student says yes or no, but usually, there is an "aha!" moment, the idea being that you can figure out where "there" is without ever technically being "there."

Understanding the basics of the derivative was the first place I banged my head, but that was because I didn't adequately understand the secant. Once I understood that, the derivative fell into place. (In fact, calculus was where I realized how much I didn't understand trigonometry.)
I've been a Flex developer for the last few years and you couldn't be more right. Every time I dig deep into the framework and find something that doesn't work I get the feeling some Adobe engineer knew it was broken but their manager told them ship anyway.

My favorite lately was an Adobe plugin for Photoshop to export FXG files (FXG is Adobe's SVG used to build Flex graphics). If you run the script it doesn't even preserve text layers, it turns them into bitmaps instead. I could write that script in an hour, why even bother releasing it as a half baked feature?
Well, I think it goes to show that an automated process that attempts to log in with a random string every 10 minutes to a random account should probably be a standard feature of production. (Or maybe just to a specific account so you don't lock people out, but random would be ideal.)
I just drummed for a gig and the sound man walked up and set my monitor levels using an iPad standing beside me on the stage, no wires, no yelling, no pointing, no charades. It was unbelievable. For those who say that tablets are toys, not useful, not practical.... get ready.

Apple will enjoy for a while and Androids will crush in 2 years (unless Oracle wins it's lawsuit).
There also appears to be studies that say attractive faces are easier for the brain to process.

http://bit.ly/cdH8b
If this was the case though, don't you see a really big issue? They're running test data through a financial production system? That wouldn't just be retarded, it would be illegal anywhere else. If you're *SX and creating fake money in a real system you're going to get into a lot of trouble.
I'm not claiming expertise -- just a heads up. I gather this resource may already be avoided by some/many.
Indeed, an entire tributary of modern law (Equity) arose because of the excessive formalism of the common law as it then was.
These aren't all equally difficult, but if anybody at work proposed putting a fresh-out-of-college employee on them, I'd scream in terror:

Design a complicated system, mostly correctly, in their head, and create a plan for getting to MVP as quickly as possible, and incrementally advancing to the complete system without ever having to really rip anything out (unless it was part of the plan). You can imagine how this is valuable to a business. It also takes a lot of experience, because even if you can mouth mantras like DRY and "separation of concerns" there's a lot of room left to screw up in exactly how you separate concerns. (And many developers aren't even familiar with those terms.)

Design a non-trivial web site with various user roles, which is actually secure even if you fully control the incoming HTTP requests from top to bottom. Sounds easy. Evidence suggests that the skills to pull this off are not found in every developer, though.

Correctly program a concurrent program with a significant UI, using only the tools readily available in traditional UI environments like Windows or Java. (It shouldn't be rocket science and I believe someday it won't be. But it is today. Arguably, this isn't even something a master developer can do, it's just something it takes a master developer to even come close to getting away with.) Think something like being someone who writes the game engines, like the Unreal engine. There's a kernel down in the core of the engine that you can throw as many mediocre developers at as you like, it will never work.

There's even things like "knowing which paradigm to apply to which part of the problem" which groking knowing several paradigms in the first place. A programmer who has never heard of "logic programming" isn't going to recognize an opportunity to literally replace tens of thousands of terrible lines of code with hundreds of good ones. A programmer who doesn't understand compilers or interpreters isn't going to recognize the place where they can provide a DSL to a user and save unbounded amounts of lower-level code. A programmer who has only gone to school and has no outside experience isn't going to know that memcached even exists, let alone that it is wildly better than anything they could possibly write.

If it sounds like some of these things aren't that rare, well, I'm mostly not trying to describe things that only the top 0.01% of developers could do. I'm looking more in the top 25%-ish on most of these, maybe top 5% at best. But there's definitely a bottom 50% that these things are out of the question. (Many of them, of course, will grow and move up, everyone starts a bottom-1% developer.)
Rad feedback, thanks Matt.

Have you seen our HackerNews landing page? http://hacker.postmarkapp.com We just launched it this month, curious if this helps at all.
There's a difference between being anti-union, and anti-medallion. I like taxi drivers. It's not their fault they have to pay hundreds of thousands for a medallion, and work with a lot of overly strict rules.

AFAIK, these strict rules don't stop taxis from screwing over tourists, and occasionally assaulting customers. I'm pretty sure an Uber system would, as the bad eggs would be tracked down a lot easier.

If unions want to protest unsafe cars, or 14 hour shifts, or they want the right to refuse service to unruly customers, that's fine. It's not a simple matter of supply and demand. But unions shouldn't be locking other workers out.
Harden Up: Can We Break Your Password With Our GPUs?
Bingo.

The fact of the matter is not everyone can hire amazing programmers. Average is average; this isn't Lake Wobegon.

Most startups would be better off figuring out how to get the best out of the average programmer, than investing in the search costs of that diamond in the rough. If you find one, awesome, but the plan shouldn't revolve around it.
I'm upvoting you for a well-written, well-reasoned reply but I'm not convinced. Chrome OS's sweet spot is instant on web and email also, but I'd venture to guess it isn't going to sell nearly as well as the iPad has/will. Certainly it's not as good in other areas, but if that really is what this trend boils down to it should be a big success as well.

I've never heard a potential iPad owner give a reason for wanting an iPad. The iPad is a fashion accessory. I've seen people crowd around them at parties during the early days lustfully wanting it, but no one mentioned apps or email or anything like that. Or anything about the experience at all.