skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The "don't feel like a victim" advice is a very dangerous when a person really is a victim and needs to get away from an aggressor.

Did you even read the article?

By not feeling like a victim, you own your problem, and this enables you to solve it. In this case, by getting away from the aggressor.
if 0.01% users are 1% of their revenue, that's a huge concerning consolidation. AWS IS indeed in this situation when the full discretionary spending sector struggles.

AWS might be super high margins, but it does not exist in a vacuum. AWS cross subsidization powers AMZN retail to be able to run at a <1% margin.
Bingo. Andrew Chen, formerly of Uber, says exactly that in his excellent new book The Cold Start problem. The driver side is the hard side of the market and must be constantly tended.
Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal (2018)
This is exactly my thought. Why make every website specify `system-ui` to look nice? Why not just make it the default? I'm struggling why we need system-ui, ui-serif, ui-sans-serif... When we already have initial, serif, sans-serif...
I wonder how well this will work with PostgREST. Looks very interesting.
This ingenuity is why schemes to encode civil or god forbid criminal law in a blockchain are misguided.
It is a terrible business at large scale.

A smaller and leaner model could work at small scale by focusing on via drivers focusing on their returns with word of mouth marketing.

If you use Uber a bunch, then it is a great way for good drivers to get repeat business privately. A simple platform which is driver-friendly which focused on the whale customers (like myself when I was spending $500/mo+ for commuting) could squeeze the Uber even more. When I started working with a few drivers via text, I was able to save money whilst the driver made more money
> Since then, the mainstream has made damn good and sure that won't happen again.

Sounds conspiratorial. The best you can say is psychedelics were banned, which is half of what made the hippies lose interest in their parents’ generation.

But the other half was improved communications technology, and it improved again after that so there’s no longer a way to have a single counterculture. Just because you’re into one thing about hippiedom doesn’t mean you need to sign up for all of it.

Since then there have been countercultures, but they were right-wing ones like the Moral Majority. You wouldn’t recognize those if you just think they’re being extra-normie.
It doesn't. My guess is that some people find crypto icky, and their thinking is that if the browser vendor is doing an icky thing they can't be trusted to keep the browser secure.
I cannot read the article but I cant imagine a situation where this would be true. The only thing this might facilitate is legal direct exchange between individuals without a 3rd party licenced broker dealer. Even then, is that really a good thing?

Pseudo anonymous gun sales hardly seem to be a step forward.

A federal data base of gun sales would be simple if Congress allowed it, but that is currently against the law.

So I guess I fail to see a real problem a blockchain would solve even if such tracking was allowed by congress.
This is done in order to mitigate Han Unification - I suspect on OSs that aren't ancient this is probably Fine, but if you have a huge userbase like Bootstrap you probably need to support these people
These dudes also had a (to most contemporary people) deeply weird metaphysics that brought them to these understandings and allowed them to share them despite extreme differences in their lives.

Unless you also believe that the entire universe including yourself is a single sentient being and every event is perfectly predetermined, you're gonna find some contradictions here.

It's not really a unified coherent practical philosophy when separated from that cosmology. Individual parts of it can still be individually valuable of course, but other parts truly are just an emperor telling people to deal with it.

A more western-digestible analogy would be believing in the resurrection of christ without believing in his divinity. You could still get useful advice from the sermons but it stops being a coherent foundation of belief for your role in the world.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31543516
Just one example: sharing data between processes
Comments like this, boring and dismissive and with absolutely no effort put into them (often responding to one that does have a lot of effort in it), are not big HN energy and don't belong here. Zero value.
The browser does a man-in-the-middle attack on webpages. It’s sketchy, dodgy and scammy. It was bad when they introduced it, but in 2022 it completely indefensible.
> it doesn’t magically change font in the middle of the sentence

It's not magic but it can happen. In fact, it usually does. Helvetica doesn't have emoji glyphs. Guess what happens if you drop an emoji in a block of text formatted with Helvetica?
Through a credit system that is centralized, just like China's credit system. Except it's not even run by elected officials so there's no representation.

it's a terrible idea and Boiled Cabbage makes a very good point
I think the conclusion here is back-to-front.

Code that never needs to be touched is fine. Although the odds are that such code is either completely trivial or subtly wrong (or both).

Code that is touched every day is likely to be fine as well. It's should get smoothed out naturally, like a pebble in a stream. If not, you probably already have lots of alarm bells telling you it's a problem without the need for any further analysis. It's not the code quality that matters here so much as the test coverage.

The changes you really need to worry about are to code nobody has touched for 3 years and whoever wrote it no longer works for the company. Especially if that code was written with the mindset of "nobody will ever care about this code".

A better metric for deciding where you should focus the most effort on code quality is not frequency of modification, it is frequency of appearance in the runtime call-graph. Each call probably also need a multiplier for how deep in the call-stack it was, since that's where unintended consequences of a small change are likely to have the biggest blast radius.
25.
Uber and Lyft Are Out of Ideas, Jacking Up Prices in Desperation for Profit (vice.com)
127 points by elsewhen 2 hours ago | flag | hide | 179 comments

Above is what I saw on the HN front page minutes ago. Then I started reading the comments thread and suddenly the submitted article has changed. It is now pointing to WSJ instead of VICE.

Looks like the original VICE article has even been scrubbed from HN entirely.

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=vice.com

Below is the original article.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7vmpb/uber-and-lyft-are-out...
Adoption metrics say otherwise on both their browser and ad system but sure.
Until the pyramid scheme collapses and everyone loses their money.
He said Uber is taking 3.75. that means the driver is getting 11.25.

You flipped the values. The driver is making a bunch, and that's per ride, not per hour
That doesn't follow, and you're forgetting the golden rule of value:

A thing's value is the what two people agree to transact for.

A thing's value isn't dome statistical hand wave. It's a statement of fact. A dependent variable with a huge multiplicity of inputs.

If a laborer is not will ing to sell their time, which arguably, a great deal of American laborers probably shouldn't be right now given the rates many employers are offering and exploitive business models in use, Then the value is not defined.

Businesses can essentially name their price because there is a capital management complex that overall colludes to create an emergent that as a happy side effect for the actors within, leads to members being generously enriched.

The glorious absurdity to it all though, is that group is in part primarily empowered by us
The enemy here, is us.
“Cursor-based pagination is the most efficient method of paging and should always be used when possible.” Facebook API Docs

Why is it more efficient than key set pagination? According to this article https://archive.ph/2021.04.30-125536/https://medium.com/swlh... the only difference is that the value of the key is encoded to allow the implementation to change
everything only matters in context. In general.
> which will never scale past the size of a single US state

People live in a city and take cabs in that city. Build a city-scale app. For extra credit, add federation APIs to interoperate with other city-scale worker-owned co-op apps.

Only a tiny 0.1% of people (including Uber's dumb investors) think that being able to use the same app in every city on earth is a killer feature.
It’s also a denial strategy. The bleeding edge that also forces your competitors out of the market because they cannot get past the network effect and name recognition hurdle is worth its weight in gold.

Most people will say they’re going to get an Uber, even if they end up having to use Lyft, no? Ubers, as well as others’, expressed strategy has long been not only first mover, but also monopolization of all aspects of their space, expressly anti-competitive. Part of that is not only being the leader, first to mind, but also draining the enemy/competitor’s resources and undermining their efforts to even challenge you. It’s a total market domination strategy that shouldn’t even be allowed, but they’ve also paid off politicians and captured government in other ways too, so don’t expect anything from there either. There used to be other ride sharing services, I don’t even know if they exist anymore, but even before the Great Monopolization, aka COVID, they were barely scraping by on crumbs in a few local markets while the likes of Uber worked in basically every market, especially in the high spending business travel and entertainment segments.
Yep, on my Windows 11 machine these fonts are rendering as Arial, which is most definitely _not_ the System UI font. I would definitely consider an alternative to this stack.
I think you should read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31543498

You consider "true counterculture" things like LGBT and veganism, that are openly supported by every western government and corporation? Really?

When you call other forms of counterculture "harmful" what you're really saying is "things that my culture has told me are harmful", or in other words "things that are counter to my culture".
Berne was a really innovative and perceptive thinker, who made an effort to keep his writing accessible to non-specialists.

Both Games People Play and What Do You Say After You Say Hello, where the idea of life scripts is explained.
Bewilderment has my vote

"How does this keep working?"

Though now that I type it out, this implies an initial bout of trickery
That means almost nothing. If the only party label that gets you elected is Democrat then everyone runs as a Democrat - it’s still the same people. You don’t live in the UK where the party can fire you. They literally have no control over anything.

(Everything people blame on this is actually caused by having primary elections, but California uses jungle primaries, which have different incentives.)
It requires considerable optimism to think GF's approach is "tenable". I don't believe it is.
It looks each epoch speaks about the universe in its own terms: as gods' creation, as a machine, as a computer, AI... So while there is no way to disprove the sandbox theory you presented, we can be 100% sure that at some point in time people will see it in a different way, and then it will change again and again. Sometimes I feel sad that there are so many mysteries of the universe and so few of them will be discovered during my lifetime.
For my game, King of Kalimpong, I run physics on the client and the server. The server is the boss but the client feels good.

I suspect most games where movement is primarily physics-based are doing this, but who knows, netcode tends to be very game-specific.
Your distinction is irrelevant.

Owning your problem will always result in a better outcome than focusing on victimhood and blame. Blame places control and solutions outside yourself.
Better driving visuals, energy calcs, driver profiles in Tesla OTA v2022.16.0.2
> I've had over 10,000 Uber rides, all black, some SUV since 2011

10000/11/365 = 2.5 per day, is this your main means of transportation?
If this were true, stars couldn't form from hydrogen clouds. The primordial universe had only hydrogen. Fusion in stars created neutrons and helium, but this only happened as a result of high temperatures and pressures caused by gravity compressing hydrogen until fusion starts.

So I don't see how a universe where protons didn't create gravity could develop stars.
>It uses a MITM attack to inject Cryptocurrency span into webpages

Are we talking about the opt-in ads (which might contain "Cryptocurrency span") or the affiliate codes (which are injected into pages you've already decided to visit)?
The Uber app alone would probably need much more than 30 developers, see here : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25376346
> two of them could have held down the Space Shuttle when it was trying to launch. To keep the reactor from flying apart, they needed 38

And all that for a reactor that was unable to break even in energy terms, let alone ignite and break even economically.

It perfectly illustrates the folly of magnetic confinement: to hold the plasma you need fields so strong and equipment so massive and expensive that the capital expenses get out of control, fully negating any advantage fusion might have over fission. We already know how to make capital intensive energy - the fueling costs are negligible for a fission reactor, yet those largely failed in the market. An even more expensive and capital intensive solution is dead in the water for economic reasons regardless of any theoretical merits.
So you're against the idea of Uber, eBay, Care, Lyft, etc? Since what I'm describing already exists. Not to mention the credit bureaus. You'd prefer arbitrariness? If anything a single place for the trust would be better as it would be more thoroughly examined.
Definitely not a tokamak.
Experimental results become credible when they can be reproduced consistently.

Theoretical results become more credible when they are independently verified.
In the US only GenX and early millennials had subcultures, which is also why they’re the only people in bands.

Everyone after them thinks it’s weird that they’ve confused listening to a single kind of music with an entire lifestyle.

(Boomers, who had a single counterculture instead of subcultures, similarly thought that doing drugs at music festivals was somehow actively saving the world.)
I don't think you understand what a man in the middle is or how it works at the browser engine level but sure keep repeating it.
Apollo was also a dead end. It resulted in a system that was so expensive not even the government wanted to keep using it. It's taken a private approach to get launch costs down to the point that returning the moon may be practical.
Interest rates are not being kept "artificially low": central banks have already raised rates, and have signalled that they intend to continue raising rates.
If they wanted to really track the filter life, they would use a static pressure sensor like a lot of HVAC installations have. It's clear what the companies doing this DRM shit are prioritising, and it's not accuracy.
I don't think he's missing that. Why does an app to connect drivers to passengers that's been around for a decade need R&D?

Now this is not about self driving or whatever else, it's about a ride hailing app. The point is there is no reason ride hailing can't be profitable.

Now, using any company to prop up r&d and investor hype for a moonshot, that's a whole other idea...
Long COVID – a public health crisis taking out women at height of their lives
>Dahn appears to have hit the motherload

It's "lode", you ignoramus!
>Ultimately, I wonder if Uber is prime to be disrupted if drivers got together and funded a few engineers to build a city-scale service for the hailing and payment aspect.

Apparently a whole bunch of folks are trying to do just that.

I was going to provide just one example, but a web search[0] shows a whole bunch of these efforts in a variety of locales. As such, I just provided the web search results here.

[0] https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=ride%20share%20cooperativ...
A lot of those goofy idea companies convinced everyone else that they should spend nearly unlimited amounts on AWS because of opex or other reason, and now everyone believes they need to migrate to cloud as well. Maybe they do, what do I know? I don’t feel a need to contribute to that huge margin that AWS makes, but based on their growth and the interest from lots of legacy businesses in moving to the cloud, I wouldn’t be too worried about them.
At this point who hasn't heard of Uber?

They only need some occasional reminders that might be targeted at the few people that haven't used or heard of friends or family using an Uber before.
Sales and marketing should be labeled price discrimination. It’s all incentives to match driver earnings and rider costs to respective minima (maxima).
15. You milk all your signs from twitter

He's right, but a bit late to the party
Playing with a 3D representation of RGB color space
You don't even need multiple apps. Even if a Postgres DB only scaled to a single city, which is wrong to begin with, you could shard it per city/state/country pretty easily.
I don't think you can create a conflict as in "corrupt the database", but it is definitely possible to lose data depending on how you have set your FSYNC settings in the redis config. The docs mention that a truncated AOF file (such as might happen during a power failure) will not invalidate it but the last command will be lost. The default is to sync to disk every second, so you could lose up to a second of data that your backend did consider to be written. You can also set it to fsync after every write query, but this will be much slower.

https://redis.io/docs/manual/persistence/ has all the details.
> No, this is bad because it provides additional signal for fingerprinting.

Not really. The fonts selected by these font-family values should, at most, be dependent on the OS and language of the host system -- which are already easy to detect.
It is useful to understand the underlying layers so as to take advantage of what they are good at and not end up in the position of relying on operations where they perform badly.

"What is are the natural, performant operations for the layer below me? How can I construct my solution from these operations instead of pretending the layers are orthogonal?"

A good example would be the linear read/write performance of harddisks. If you had the option to avoid random access and take advantage of read-ahead and other methods you'd have seen much better performance than an approach that ignored this behavior.

There are many, many examples of this.
Keep in mind, a sudden, explosive move away from petro as the basis for motoring will cause further price hikes in gas as more optimizations that made sense at the higher level of demand start biting back.

Just wait til the largest crude transports start ending up being overkill for the amount of petroleum moving around. There's not been tooling for smaller scale production as far as I'm aware for a while.

Then again, I'm bearish on the whole electrify everything push. I think the Grid and all downstream industries will need a fundamental revamp to facilitate even half of what people just assume is going to come out of the wall.
The kinds of devs who don’t regularly learn new languages are generally the ones you don’t want to hire.
Off the top of my head:

- Lying about the debit/credit machine being broken in order to receive cash.

- Being unwilling to drive to/from certain neighborhoods.

- Not turning the meter on in order to take advantage of people not from the city/country.

- My (possibly incorrect) perception is that they are harder to hold to account. I do not always know the number of the taxi that picked me up and dropped me off.

- Calling a taxi dispatch does not guarantee one will arrive. If service is slow you end up in a strange limbo of "Is that taxi late or have I been abandoned at 2:30am?"

There's probably more but those are the ones that spring to mind based on my personal experiences with taxis. Even if Uber was only offered as a premium service I would still order one over a taxi.
I had to add a lot to my user.js (or about:config) just to avoid Mozilla's shady telemetry and diagnostics. If you google it, there's even Hardended Firefox...
I disagree. The internet is its own culture and it is absolutist. It has perpetuated a lot of falsehoods like, e.g. that popularity equates with truth and that damages people. It is not possible to pay for counterculture because cash has been replaced by the visa-paypal-apple-google cartel. The internet needs to meet its counterculture
Found the download link: https://download.anytype.io/

Edit: Doesn't work at all on my Mac, it's a blank window
In order to direct that much laser energy on target, they had to expend far more energy than the claimed output. Never forget, the laser system is far less than 10% efficient.
DT fusion has inherently lousy volumetric power density. ITER's thermal power density, for example, is 400x worse than a commercial pressurized water reactor's primary reactor vessel. ARC's is 40x worse. Now couple that with those cores being far more complex than a fission core, and the difficulty of maintenance (they will be too activated for hands on maintenance.)

IMO, the only fusion company that has a real chance is Helion. Most of the breathless hype runs into generic showstopping issues like the ones above. If someone presents a new fusion concept, ask them about their power density, and how much complexity there is in that core.
Ask HN: How about right to extended use?
Like right to repair, wouldn’t it be great if web-connected product companies were required to make it easier to extend use of their products?

I simply want to save my Ring Doorbell camera photo to cloud storage when someone presses the doorbell so that I can show it on a digital picture frame inside.

It can’t easily be done because Ring has no public API that IFTTT can use.

Of course, legislation would have to trigger only when a company reached a certain level of revenue maturity, much like CCPA, so as not to stifle an up-and-coming product company.

What do you think?
They are "bad medicine" if considered as a solution for the public transportation issues in North America, yes. It's not the technology that I am against, it's the fetishism that the tech will be so amazing that it can justify all the shit that people are putting up with now, and not looking at more important problems that if solved could eliminate the need for the tech in the first place

> And if people see a path to further improving their lives by, separately, changing other things about infrastructure or density or whatever

That's just a really twisted way of saying that you don't mind sacrificing the commons if it means you get to play with cool gadgets. It's a lot easier for one individual to go and buy a driverless Tesla and think "oh, at least my car does not stay in a parking lot after my ride is done" than it is to go and promote actual change in urban planning to avoid car dependency in the first place. But because you are (presumably) on the top of the pyramid, you don't actually care about it.

> Again these things are non-rival.

At the first order, it may seem like that. But after we see the interaction of these apparently-orthogonal policies (e.g, zoning laws and public infrastructure) and their inconsistent implementations the problems become very clear. It is hard to argue only with hypotheticals, but I could bet that if driverless cars became a reality tomorrow, cities would be worse in 10 years than they are today.