skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's nothing to do with left vs. right. It's people with vested interests. For most people, getting a taxi is a minor annoyance. They don't know what any candidates' standing on the issue is, and don't even know how the issue effects them. Why would they consider it when they go to the polls?

But medallion owners care. If someone says they will end the program, they will vote like crazy against it. They will also tell the drivers (who might actually stand to gain if they could get their own medallions at a lower cost) that margins will drop, cheap competitors will move in, safety standards will drop, and so on.

The same is true of sugar imports, patent laws, retrospective copyright extensions, and other issues which have a few people who care about it, and a lot who don't even understand it.

OK, you could say that deregulation is what the right (or libertarians) stands for. But sometimes it works the other way - regulations and subsidies can arguably help the broader community while hurting a few special interest groups.
It's not in the education system's best interests to tell you not to get a higher degree. Anyway, many of the teachers you'd ask probably get hired because of their degree, so even if they give you an honest answer, they're incredible biased.
It's perfectly possible to balance the budget, create a surplus and start paying down the debt, and have the debt still increase because the interest exceeds the surplus. This is what happened under Clinton, he created a surplus and started using it to pay down the debt but it wasn't big enough to stop the growth. Had Bush stuck to Clinton policies, it would have been.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures
Tienanmen Square is a real place, you know. It's a popular tourist spot. So it's not in their best interests to block that search.
I try to be one of those scientists who is also well-versed in the humanities.

There are very few rewards for it, though, apart from a smug feeling of superiority to everybody and a massive further decrease in the number of people with whom I have anything in common. :)
Direct Response Web Minute 7: How To Measure Your Website Traffic
No, exposing public security holes is not a crime.
No. With a large bias you'd have hundreds of one result for one of the other.
Ten seconds on wikipedia would have shown you that the use of this symbol to denote dollars and pesos predates (if just barely) the founding of the United States.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_sign

So, barring time travel, I suggest that your theory about a U superimposed on an S must be wrong (at least as a causal story).

I've got to learn to stop caring about the rampant America-centrism on H.N.
Though I find the comments of both Lee and Rubin to be very short sighted, this article is equally limited in vision.

I doubt Google or Microsoft are as far behind as the author describes.

Microsoft has already been working with voice interaction with Kinect on, and WP7 has voice search. The Kinect API is being built into Windows 8.

I haven't used Android (about to install it on my touchpad), but my understanding is that the voice capabilities are there, just not as refined as Siri.

Apple has a lead here, but I doubt it is insurmountable. The challenge once again for Google and MS is that Apple has jumped up and said "we're the first to do this", and are marketing the hell out of it, so everybody else just looks like imitators.
It's the norm here in Canada too. There's a trade-off you need to make though, between making a lot of money, and making little.

My father worked three jobs when I was growing up, to support our family. He never complained about wealth inequality; he just did what he had to. Sure, it'd be nice if everyone got paid a lot of money - but since that's never going to happen, people might need to adjust what the norm is.
What Antirez is referring to is the fact that when a Redis hash is fairly small, it is stored as an array that is scanned linearly (worse time complexity, but lower memory usage), and is only "upgraded" to a true hash table when there are many key/value pairs. (This is mostly an implementation detail, however - from an API standpoint, you interact with hashes the same regardless of what internal representation they are using.)

In both cases, Lamernews still stores comment IDs as the hash keys and the JSON-serialized structures as the hash values, antirez was just commenting on a memory-saving feature of Redis for small hashes.
Random notes.

The word "medallion" carries an emotional charge (it's archaic), but taxi medallions aren't all that different from commercial zoning restrictions.

Regardless of why they were introduced, medallions do more than restrict competition; they also give medallionholders something to lose if they abuse their license. Were barriers to entry eliminated, unscrupulous companies could put unsafe cabs on the road and simply fold up shop and reincorporate when anything bad happened.

Ironically, the sky-high price of NYC medallions is a result of a free-market spin on taxi licenses: taxi permits in NYC can be freely bought and sold (like seats on a stock exchange).

Cities have experimented with taxi deregulation and the results have been mixed; in particular, taxi deregulation has been reported not to improve driver salaries.

It's also important to remember that street taxi service is not a particularly efficient market system. In the norms of the taxi market, you cannot in fact be choosy about what cab picks you up (even if you could, there's virtually no information available to you when a cab pulls up). It's thus hard to argue that street taxi competition would be that beneficial to consumers.

On the other hand, because the street taxi market is also characterized by lots of externalized costs (pollution, traffic, hit-and-run accidents, etc), one way consumers could conceivably benefit from "competition" among cab drivers would be to auction permits off, and increase the cost of entry to the taxi market.
A little more sophistication in their Selective Syncing would be nice as well. And maybe some response to questions on the forums, at least for paying customers.

I'm a paying customer, but I'm not a happy paying customer.
Hi! Aw, thanks for your support =)

I hear some mean things about PayPal sometimes too! Unfortunately it was the simplest donation process I knew how to implement (I was checking out Stripe but there was a lot of API/developer stuff I didn't understand--my friend had to help me install my Mixpanel trackers because I didn't really understand Javascript either), and it seemed like a convenient way for people to donate.

I just checked/validated my site on w3.org after googling what you might have meant by valid html, haha. (What a neat tool!) 31 errors .. ! Uhoh. Will get working on those, thanks for your review =)!
youtube-dl: http://rg3.github.com/youtube-dl/
Works for me; both styles. Clicking on the label selects the checkbox/radio.
Sorry, a typo. It's "show item info."
Melbourne Airport is on the outer fringe of the city and there's always a push to get public transport to the airport, in the form of light rail - a taxi to the CBD is north of $30, from memory. The land is there, the public support is there, but the taxi lobby keeps killing it every time. I've never understood where they get their power from.
OS X Lion. I've noticed it in Snow Leopard too.
Funnily enough, I did this in college - and it was great! Especially since you can choose the toppings.
The best surgeons often work with more of the most complex cases, which makes it difficult to naively compare death rates.
Looks cool but who is going to do the work? Is this advice only? Are attendants expected to work on each other's project?
Donald Trump: Internet Gambling Mogul
Yeah, that is pretty crap pay, and I certainly wouldn't work 54 hours a week for it - but that's because I can get much more, for about the same amount of work. That isn't the same for everyone.

Several of my friends, while great people, unfortunately have a close-to-minimum-wage skill set. I'm just saying that these people who are making so little could make more, if they put in more time.
the first picture is of an agent on his back under a truck inspecting it. Is that standard weigh station behavior? And if not, won't those kind of inspections slow everything down more?
Ask the people that bought gold in the late 70s how safe their investments were. Gold prices crashed in 1981 and never rebounded until the gold bugs returned in the mid-2000s.
> Um, Gramm-Leach was supported by a majority of both Dems and Reps. Clinton signed it.

While this is true, of those who opposed it, the vast majority were Democrats. 58 Democrats opposed it, only 6 Republicans did. The Republicans also controlled both houses and wrote the legislation so they certainly deserve more blame.

Repealing Glass-Stegal set the fuse by allowing banks to flip loans into the market offloading their risk, but it was the change in the net capital rule (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_capital_rule#The_net_capita...) in 2004 under the Bush administration that lit the match and kicked off the crisis by creating a massive amount of potential credit that led to the banks handing out loans like candy to anyone who'd take em knowing they could immediately flip the loan and pocket the profit with little risk.
MochiMedia: From game developers to building a scalable business
> Facebook doesn't force you to use their services, and if you do so voluntarily then it's on facebook's terms, though luck.

WRONG! Think about all the sites that have Like buttons. Facebook never showed me a form or a checkbox to use that, did they? Yet they're gathering information on the sites I go to and setting up "shadow profiles" (as europe-v-facebook put them).

You're right, Facebook doesn't make me use Facebook -- they're trying to force me to.

And sure, I can just use hosts to block the Facebook site, but I shouldn't have to do that just to stop them from tracking me.
My money's on Andrew Ng's deep learning research. Deep learning has already had huge success, both in reproducing the measured behavior of neurons in the brain, and in outperforming the state of the art on various machine learning classification tasks.

Here's an overview which references some very impressive results: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AY4ajbu_G3k
The two attempts at disk storage so far - VM and Diskstore - are both based on the concept of RAM as the primary datastore and the disk as merely auxiliary storage. However, antirez is a perfectionist, so he scrapped both of them when they didn't work as well as he had hoped.

In the long term (i.e. after cluster is finished), there are plans to manipulate data structures directly on disk (an incredibly elegant solution, and also really good for SSDs). Though in the short term, you are right in that RAM is far more expensive than disk, and this does limit the utility of Redis as a primary datastore.
I think that if somebody just skips over programming-related things that they don't understand, it might be indicative that they are destined to be bad at programming.
Layer 7 Technologies named Deloitte Technology Fast 500 company for 2011
The internet is great at killing business models where middlemen make the lion share of profit. Like Taxi medallion holders.
Über and services like it will destroy their margins eventually, and thus push down the price of medallions.
OP here. I had a typo in my blog post. It's "show item info" not "show item preview."
Yes, yes we are. A programmer who is not a /little/ lazy is a bad thing.
Likely more recently than you might think. See, for instance, the Wikipedia entry on FedEx Smartpost (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FedEx_Ground).

edit: regarding UPS: http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r22924632-ups-using-USPS-for...
Awesome! Thx!
You could still issue treasuries. As long as we're not experiencing deflation (the Fed is supposed to target 2% inflation), there's plenty of room for the government to borrow money at negative real interest rates, which it should be happy to do even if running surpluses.

Other countries deal with surpluses with sovereign wealth or rainy day funds, but you could just as easily envision rebating a surplus as fully-refundable tax credit "dividends".
Bloomberg was a lifelong Democrat before deciding to run for mayor. He became a Republican since he was unlikely to win the Dem primary.
He was talking about a specific edge case where the window-owner wasn't going to spend the money - ever. In this case the community would have the money and the hoarder would live identically to before - minus the nest egg.

As you say, if they weren't guaranteed to hoard the money then the window would cancel out a suit, or some other economic activity.
"It's also important to remember that street taxi service is not a particularly efficient market system. In the norms of the taxi market, you cannot in fact be choosy about what cab picks you up (even if you could, there's virtually no information available to you when a cab pulls up)."

The technology to do this already exists. If taxi drivers could see where the demand is, and riders could see feedback on drivers, it would solve this problem. Of course technology alone is not enough. To achieve this, you'd need to disrupt the status quo, a part of which is laws that disallow "street hails" of taxis that don't have medallions.
But the government can just start buying its bonds on the free market if it has extra cash before its debts mature.
Balanced budgets as a long term policy are a fine thing, and absolutely a good idea. Austerity in the face of recession is madness. This is the Greece/Portugal/Ireland solution, and it's a terrible one. Paul may be one of the few politicians to earnestly care about the first issue; but he's yet another tea party whackjob with his head in the sand about the second.
For now. Uber won't break their business model alone. They will probably maintain a premium for quality.
But with the precedent set, other 'brands' will eventually jump in and attempt to duplicate the technology and offer taxi-like service for similar cost, without the medallions.
BitTorrent starts streaming DJ sets to test live P2P
Describing Products That Don't Exist
If you crowdsource a story, who owns the movie rights?
Steve Blank: How the iPhone Got Tail Fins--Part 2 of 2
Australia paid off all of it's federal public debt in the mid-2000's. By 2007 the Federal government had no net debt. That is - the net position of the governement (savings-debt) was zero.

This didn't mean that there were no securities on issue - the need for an active market in government debt meant that there were still securities outstanding, but these were offset by liquid assets that could be sold to buy back the debt if necessary. I don't know what the surplus money was invested in, but one of the leftovers from that period is a 'Future Fund' which is a very large pool of investment funds held in trust for the future pension needs of the public service. That is - the money was separated out from the general revenue pit and put aside to pay out the retirement benefits of the people employed by the government itself. I do know that this fund is a diversified fund like any other, and invests in different styles and classes of securities.

Of course, a change in government since that period and a drop in revenues from the financial crisis means this is no longer the case. But for that brief period it was a very good place to be - income tax rates were going down every single year and the economy had an unbroken 13 year period of real growth in wages and productivity.

You don't need public debt to function properly. Australia is a perfect example of this. In fact, a lack of public debt is a good thing as it allows a government to either return taxes via lowering tax rates, or invest the surplus for the inevitable rainy day, or, to build productive infrastructure if that is what they choose to do.
Following the wave of college dropout billionaires, we are going to be seeing high school dropout billionaires... ;)
If I was you I would check out http://i.crowdfunded.it/

Might be related to what you're doing :)
Now you know. From Medallion holders.
You misread. He means that the republican congress failed to reduce spending as fast as 92-94 even though they shut the government down.
Not Clinton, but you could make a case that Gore was responsible. There is a lot of noise laughing at him for supposedly saying he created the Internet, but he did co-sponsor an important bill in 1988, and was honored with a Webby Award in 2005 for contributions to the Internet.

http://www.snopes.com/quotes/internet.asp
Like Crazy Movie Trailer
Like Crazy Movie Trailer
The first thing we notice about like crazy is how well no its crazy How cute would be more appropriate if anything more revolting the title.
Launching is still largely a starting point.

Building businesses take years.
Sure enough, if I fake my User-Agent as an iPad, I get a <video> tag referencing a .mp4, which I can then download and watch. Now if only infoq would provide a "download" link pointing to the same .mp4.
But suggesting that Bush's tax policy didn't have anything to do with the subsequent massive drop in federal revenues is not silly.
The benefit for consumers is that there are enough taxis to go around. If I need to get somewhere in SF I have these choices:

- Call in a taxi (long wait time, high chance of a no-show)

- Hail a taxi (sometimes impossible, wait times can be close to 20 minutes in some parts of town)

- Use homobiles (might get picked up by a smoker's car or someone carrying a dog, wait times can exceed 45 minutes)

- Use Uber (more expensive, but very low wait time)

Uber is the clear choice almost every time now, but if there were enough taxis there would be a reason for them to show up when you called, and a reason for the cab companies to invest in an app as good as Uber's.
Networking In The Middle (Or, How Startups Fail At It In Silicon Valley)
That may be true (not sure abuot the banning thing, I've never heard that story), but you're sort of missing the difference in spirit. Certainly the FSF in its early days was eager and active in recruiting new developers, and merging code from the community. Read all the early Gnus Bulletins for lots of examples.

If you wanted to see RMS's emacs source, all you had to do was ask and promise not to spread it around before he'd made a release. That policy may not have been a good idea in hindsight, but it certainly wasn't because of Stallman's desire to keep control over his "product".

Google, on the other hand, doesn't seem to be much in the habit of letting people see their code simply because they want to contribute.
Treasury bonds can be sold on the open market. "Treasury IOU"s cannot be sold. SS money just goes into the general fund. SS deductions are just a plain ol' tax.
> [...] picking the most convenient order for subroutine arguments, [...]

Interestingly, this gets much more important in a language with currying.
My wife got an iPhone 4S on opening weekend. Our consensus so far is that Siri is largely a gimmick. Fun to mess around with the first couple of days, but she hasn't used it once since.

Three problems:

1. AI Uncanny Valley. It's hard for her to know what's going to work and what's not. Things that seem like they should work, don't. It feels like it understands things sometimes, but obviously doesn't at other times. This makes the experience feel fragile and unreliable.

2. It's actually unreliable. The speech recognition is not quite good enough, and the connection/server issues were intermittently awful.

3. Robopsychology. My wife doesn't actually want everyone around her to know who she's calling or what she needs a reminder of, sort of for the same reason she leaves the room to take a phone call. It's socially awkward to broadcast your private interactions that way. This is true at work and in public, which greatly diminishes the opportunities she might have to use it. When she does get the opportunity, it never occurs to her.
According to Wikipedia, HDMI 1.3 & 1.4 can support 2560x1600 and much more. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDMI#Version_1.4

At the same time, I have no idea what version this laptop is supporting, but seeing as 1.3 is already 5 years old, I'd suspect that is the minimum currently supported.
Treasury bonds can be resold on the market. The "Treasury IOU"s issued to the SSA cannot be resold.
Thanks for your advice. My post was more of observation than analysis (like someone else said on this thread)

Also, you were mistaken. I didn't goad nor chide Americans. The Hacker News community is international (I'm proof), and based off visitor stats, there were a lot of them from the U.K. and Canada as well.
Interesting idea for donations. I'll give it a try once my PayPal account stops hating me.

Maybe add some alternate payment gateway support (e.g. WePay, Google Checkout, etc.)? :)
Yep, just interested in sharing my observations.
I would like to put something together but I'm not sure I've got the resources to pull it off myself. If anyone else can help, please contact me -- my email address is in my profile.
By most accounts, Uber has built a great customer experience. However their technology is not really an exclusive secret sauce. The key in disrupting taxis will likely be scaling a private operation like Uber to where it costs as much or less than taxis currently do, at least on average (hard to do), or to co-opt the current taxi/limo infrastructure to improve the customer's experience and automate things (also not easy). The technology is not a piece of cake, but not rocket science either, and is certainly not the key to the kingdom.

Disclaimer: My startup (RideCell) builds automatic request/dispatch/tracking technology for fleets.
I really look back on the experience as a stepping stone. We really got our sh*t together after the interview. In fact we left the interview, went to a nearby University commons and reworked our product on the spot. We learned so much in that 20 minute interview that has helped us to make a better product. Of course, hard evidence is required so we will have our proto up in a month or so. Then we can begin the heavy lifting. Thanks for your response and good luck moving forward!
With the super high cost of these Medallions, it seems like services like Uber should be able to compete on price, yet some how they're always more expensive than cabs.

Does anyone know why that's the case? Do Uber drivers consistently make more than cab drivers? Where does the money go?
Actually if you look at the economic growth of the 'austerity' countries it has been better than the economic growth of the 'stimulated' countries. They are both feeble, but Austerity is marginally outperforming stimulating at the current time, and down the track it will beat it hands down.

Yes, it sucks either way, but when debt is the problem, more debt is not the cure. 'Stimulating' is just borrowing future funds to try and get things going now, which, at best, just moves the problem down the road.

Many people are quick to try and string up politicians who point out the truth. Sadly this means the politicians who push the problem forwards and reassure people are the ones that get voted in. And the problem gets pushed further down the track and gets even more malignant.
> You should try and aim for the stars. Making games is all about that. Do the best you can and constantly push your limits and improve your skills... but thinking realistically and adjusting your expectations to your abilities and your budget is a big step towards creating the best game you can create.

This is advice that every aspiring indie game developer needs.
I just need to mention that tremendo's link to sciencebasedmedicine contains a MUCH higher quality of commentary than the half-dozen other articles I've read on the subject. I know an upvote ought to be enough, but it didn't seem so.
How the heck would you hold the trade deficit constant, and why would you even if you could?