skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Easy: because many of the problems the bad businesses will cause are externalities.

Your argument as stated is, "we should eliminate all taxicab and car service regulation". I assume you want to refine it a bit more. At the very least, if that's your stance, you can no longer argue that it is crazy for the state to shut down services like this: first, pass the law that deregulates cabs, then start the shadow taxi dispatch service.
XM and Sirius abruptly change lineups, confuse and annoy customers
I left the PT site after reading "Web 2.0 Interface" in the features list. Then again, all I really want is a bug tracker with standard features and brain-dead simple version control integration. Lighthouse has been good to me since the switch.
I (the person working on dashboard) respond to HN et al
What Lawyers could learn from Programmers
one of the Flickr engineers, cal Henderson, wrote a book with a title something like "building scalable websites" that was published by O'reilly. I'm pretty sure he covers that topic. You may be able to get acces online via your public libraries web site (you can in seattle, at least).

There are the obvious issues with file uploads, they can take a lot of bandwidth, and disk space, but there are a lot of less obvious problems.

1. File uploade take a lot longer than most web requests, both because of the size of the data, and because most client connections download faster than they upload.

2. As a result, file upload requests hold server resources longer than other requests. This usually comes down to memory, but there can also be file handle and socket limits. Also, more in the past than in the present day, just the CPU overhead from dealing with lots of open sockets could get to be an issue.

3. File uploads often carry a lot of memory overhead. The braindead simple way of handling way fileuploads in PHP, etc ends up buffering the whole file in memory until it the upload is complete. That can really add up. Furthermore, the process handling the upload request has the memory overhead of the PHP (or ruby, or python...) interpreter, and any code and libraries associated with your application. This overhead is carried even though most of that code and data structures are unnecessary for most of the request durration.

This memory useage really stacks up when each upload request lives for seconds, or minutes, rather than the milliseconds required for most requests.

There are lots of ways to deal with the resource issues. Writing the upload to disk as it arrives is a big improvement. You can go further by having a separate app/server instance that is tuned to minimize the size of each app/interpreter instance is another.

There are also ways to take advantage of file upload features built in to a front end webserver (like nginx) to buffer the whole upload to disk before your app has to get involved. Not to mention the amazon examples mentioned.

Turning to a specialized custom file upload server written in Java or C seems like an optimization you undertake if you outgrow the other solutions (including more memory per server, or more servers)

Imple
This logic sounds like the important part of your application, but I don't get it yet. Why does the user care about the position of their post relative to some other post? Could it be approximate instead? Also, does it have to be accurate up to the second, or would a slower update cycle work? I feel like maybe you could make some very small changes to the algorithm, and make it much more tractable on the backend.
> * Taxi drivers tend to be unsafe drivers

> * Taxi drivers tend to drive unsafe vehicles

That's for the insurance companies to settle. It's easy to imagine that "regular" liability insurance policies will prohibit commercial transportation of humans in the vehicle.

> * Taxi drivers tend to rip off their customers

Your "P2P Car Service" rating will plummet if you rip off your customers. By the same measure, eBay and Craigslist should be blatant failures.
For a more direct response/clarification, please see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=362152
"Hell, I wouldn't even care if the vehicles had been inspected recently; I can wear a seat belt."

Crashing isn't fun. I'd rather pay twice the price for a regulated licensed taxi than getting one off the internet :/
Amex issues the cards themselves, exposing them to way more risk than mc/visa. Look at the branding on your credit cards. Amex will be front-and-center on an Amex, but on most other cards it's the issuing bank. Unless it's micky mouse or your kids or some shit.

If you don't pay your Amex bill, i think Amex takes a hit to pay the merchant. If Amex were to implode, those merchants could get fucked.
IMO unlike Chicago, San Francisco needs a lot more cabs. Every time I've been there it's been nearly impossible to try to just walk down a street and hail a cab. Never had that problem in Chicago and I assume has plenty of cabs as well.
That's obviously true, but I think you might be missing my points. Right now, they are:

(1) If you lose your million dollar medallion, you are out a million dollars (and likely the ability to ever get a medallion again). If you lose your P2P car service rating, you do what every scammer on every online market has done since 1995: you fake up a new one and game it with BS reviews.

(2) Many of the most severe costs of running a bad car service are externalities. I haven't had a valid drivers license in (checking...) THREE YEARS, and I drive every single day. I drive in a car with invalid plates. I get pulled over (checking...) NEVER. Take me, but make me a foreigner with no knowledge of the rules of the road, no knowledge of the city I drive in, and a record of hit and run accidents. I would do just fine in a P2P cab market.

Any system that would have me as a cab driver is one we should be skeptical of.
Since Google, pretty much. And it probably took the marketing world a while to catch on. Certainly there are still plenty of folks who still believe that SEO is about meta-tags.
Indeed. Go Jackets.
I said myself at the last paragraph - this may well not be the case. They may be competent, but they're not giving that impression - and stating it the way I see, is at least real feedback they could use.
Without too many details: existing debts on my credit card for hosting, computers and such, conversion to a c-corp, several trips BOS-SFO, accountants, etc.

No salaries yet.
No, I kinda like it the way it is actually. Look, I think cab regulation is a good thing; let it be regulated. Despite the inherent inefficiencies and abuse that comes with any sort of regulation, I'm sure it helps consumers by providing strict rules for cabbies and cab companies.

Except, we're not talking about a Cab company because it's not licensed as one. If I want to drive people around in my car all day for a fee and I put an ad in the newspaper that says "Tom's Kinda Cab Company; I Drive You Places" why should that be illegal? If someone asks "Is this a regulated cab service" I say "No, but it's half the price!" Either they use my service or they don't. If I get turned down by so many people that it's not viable employment, I guess it's time to look elsewhere.

And, perhaps I'm being naive here, but I have no reason to believe that if I were to provide a horrible service that it would somehow affect the bottom line of Yellow Cab. I'm all about giving people choices and letting the market decide. If you decide to order a cab from some deregulated company you've never heard of and you get kidnapped and tortured instead of driven to the bar, well, that's your own fault. It's certainly not "all the cab companies'" fault. And that cab company probably won't be around long.
Chicago needs more cabs too, although San Francisco desperately needs more. Talk to a cab driver there sometime; there's some huge scam involving the dispatchers and the city government that artificially reduces the number of medallions.

To be clear: my argument isn't that current regulation is good. =)
A direct quote from that result:

"The AP and IB courses, while including some of the best education in the subject currently available at the secondary level, tend in general to be out of date, too broad, and too inflexible in their curricula."

So the argument the NRC is making is that the AP curriculum needs to be improved, but is currently some of the best available. In addition, the curriculum is being overhauled.

So what exactly is the problem with advocating increasing AB and IBO students when, even though there are problems, it's currently some of the best education available, and an overhaul to bring it in line with the NRC/NSF recommendations is underway?
I ... earn only slightly more than "market"

I am 22 years old ...

I have no options and no equity in the company.

So, you're getting an awful deal, but at least you have time to learn from your mistake.
And that's your prerogative and I think you should 100% be able to do that.
Treasury Not Planning to Buy Bad Loans, Assets
I think I mostly agree. But then, we're talking about a condition that assumes PickupPal fails as an enterprise. If they succeed, and this is forced to scale, then there's a real issue.

My original argument is really just that "it's not crazy for there to be a legal concern about this service". I think my argument is holding up OK.
Keep in mind that all schools have a foreign student quota - i.e. slots that will either be filled by foreign students or not filled at all. Foreigners do not compete with domestic students for college enrollment at all.

I would prefer an approach that is more realistic and honest about the state of immigration - the H1B is organized as a work visa, not an immigration visa. What the US needs to do is establish means for direct immigration for qualified, professional people. The problem with H1Bs all stem from the fact that, if the recipient desires permanent residency, he/she is essentially a slave to the sponsor company for 5+ years. This encourages abuse both in employee treatment and in wages - which affects everyone.

If highly qualified people can simply immigrate to the US and find jobs, without signing themselves into virtual slavery, we would all benefit.
Is Obama a US citizen
Do you think practicing unlicensed plastic surgery via the internet should be fine also? If it's half the price?

You have to draw lines to protect the public.
You're asking people to treat this company better than they're treating their prospective employees. They call a developer greedy and self-entitled and when confronted, did the same again (for even a broader group of people).

If they stopped calling people greedy/entitled/trying to blame the U.S. society (vs. themselves) and simply stated "we're early stage, we're looking for a first employee to take on founder level risk with us".
But these are all issues that a well-established P2P Car Service could handle. Require drivers to submit a current copy of their license, insurance claim history and registration for the car in question every 3-6 months. Make this information available on the website (except driver's lastname and address or whatever for privacy). Put a GPS logger in each car (if it's not on, you don't get paid). Charge exclusively on a point-to-point basis (e.g. let the driver carry the risk of going in circles).
How does a heavily regulated industry survive when it's forced to compete with deregulated competitors? Look how much better the LC carriers do than United and American. And that's just price deregulation; Southwest still has a crushing regulatory burden.

Short term, I agree, PickupPal is not the end of western civilization. But the "pitch" behind this service is basically the total deregulation of car service.
No Good Deed Goes Unpublished | The Boston Home Team Blog
From another article...

"Hennecke's stock allocations are mainly Asian-based, especially in the Chinese market as the country's government has a large amount of cash and the macroeconomics are fundamentally strong."
Fine, but these are all issues that this P2P car service doesn't handle. You basically just designed a new privatized medallion system. Plenty of car services do exactly this; it seems like you just want them to have a REST web API, so someone can build the Kayak of private car service dispatchers.
I billion Tweets, zero point zero dollars made.
I have all sorts of concerns about such a service, I just don't think Government should decide if I get to worry about those concerns or if they'll just eliminate them for me by taking away the choice in the first place.

And, no, I would not classify a legal concern in this matter as "crazy."
Systems that do this tend to burn a lot of cycles without the coder having any idea what's going on. For simple CRUD system that can be OK, but making abstractions above the database is dangerous from a performance standpoint.

Edit: There are a lot of DB tools to help you. Adding views let's you keep normalized schema's while simplifying reading data. Triggers can automate logging etc. I often see people using high level data views that end up giving them less power to manipulate data than the DB has.

PS: Why assume the schema is going to suck? Often it does suck, but that should be telling you to change the schema. I mean I know people that can't stand ugly code but they are willing to turn a blind eye to terrible databases.
"The answer? Because some of us actually like tech." - Yep.

It's true that it's much more difficult to evaluate MBA competency than engineering competency, but I do think the market is some what efficient. I've worked some pretty idiot MBAs (Harvard no less) and they haven't really gone anywhere too far.

Also, at least here in San Francisco, I've met more MBAs than I can count wishing they were engineers so they could build their ideas themselves. Consider yourself incredibly lucky and privileged to be able to take your idea from pure thought stuff to reality.
An End to the “Revolving Door”
This episode reminds me of "target fixation".

When I was learning to hang glide, my instructor said that when you want to avoid a tree or power lines, it's important to not fixate on it, because the craft tends to follow the direction you lean towards. People have died that way.

Auston wanted to avoid an employee who was only in it for the money - but by fixating on the thing that he doesn't want to be an issue (i.e. money), it has become the dominate issue. If you don't want a fire, don't fan it.

If you want to avoid something, the best strategy is sometimes to focus on something else that you do want. It's a kind of positive thinking, but one that has saved lives.
I would argue that the cost of support and the inferior user experience have not exceeded the cost of IE6 users upgrading/switching browsers. If that were the case, this thread wouldn't exist.

That said, I hate IE6 as much as the next guy...
Can we stop giving these people the attention they're obviously angling for now?
The solution is to move this website somewhere else. Last time I checked, Sealand didn't have car-sharing regulations.

Anyway, if people want to do something, you can't stop them from wanting to do it by adding a disclaimer to a website. Sorry, that's not how the world works anymore.
I think the other problem here is that we have no information available about other programs.

Isn't it just as likely that people drop out of all or many programs at relatively the same rate? Psychology, Pre-Med, Law, Business, Journalism, Poli Sci, etc.

These are undergraduates, after all.
Yeah, installing software is so difficult. Nobody uses Flash because that's a plugin too.
I think that's perfectly fine. Probably not an option I would elect for were I seeking plastic surgery, but that's neither here nor there.

I am sick of those lines. Those lines have caused me to lose the ability to smoke in a bar (or basically anywhere else) for christ sake. Those lines have created "helmet laws" and all sorts of "protect Joe from himself" bullshit laws that exist for the sole purpose of annoying me, near as I can tell.

Nobody makes Joe sit at the bar any more than anybody makes him get in my Cab (which I intend to use as a battering ram). If, in the course of my cabbing, I were to break an actual law (speed limit, driving uninsured, etc.) then I should be punished. Until then, let me drive recklessly and force small talk with strangers in peace. If you don't let me do that then you've created a law to protect Joe from his own idiocy which is bad enough, but you've also ruined a perfectly good market opportunity.
Which end of the spectrum is "good"? I got a 106.49:
http://twitterank.com/?u=notoriousbrk

That number could have been randomly generated from all I can tell about the tool.
Yes, I wanted to ask you what the output was, because, as others have pointed out, that's probably the determining factor in how you should structure the data.

If I understand correctly, when I post "A" and a short while later, I post "B", and in the meantime everyone else posts X posts, then at the time of posting B, I want to get a return of exactly X?

If that's the case, you should just keep a central counter, which is your critical region. Updating that 16.000 times a second in a blocking way should be possible. Sounds like something Erlang guys do to show off.

The rest of the app can be completely de-coupled. Once you've increased the counter, you save userid, timestamp and counter, and fetch the former post, and return the diff of the counter-values.

The only thing in this setup that's hard is the counter.

one other thing I noticed.. you're very enthusiastic about that everything should happen in exactly the correct order, and not even +/- .2 seconds deviation is in order. We're looking at around 16.000 transactions a second - that's 0.0625 ms pr transaction, or about 1/1000 of a regular internet roundtrip (50 ms is very common for DSL and Cable connections), so the of incoming requests will arrive in quite random order, within about 1000 requests .. make sure that doesn't break your business-model.
[...] In other words, this is how much information it takes to completely specify the state of one gram of water.

Isn't that what the author was getting at?
"Disclosure: I have no options and no equity in the company."

jaw drops
I think that the money is a giant red-herring here, but these guys have unfortunately chosen to validate it by responding to it.

When I evaluate a startup, the two things I care about are the idea and the team. If you're doing something world-changing (or even just "really cool") and I like & respect you, I don't care what the money is. I'll even work for free (well, for decent equity).

If you have a good team but a shitty idea, I'd work there if a.) I'm an employee, getting paid decently, and am likely to learn much or b.) I'm a cofounder, personal friends with you, and you're flexible about shifting the idea. This actually describes both my previous startup and my previous employer.

I only care about money if you have neither a good team nor a good idea - but in this case, I'm just putting in time, and you probably don't want me as an employee. Hell, I probably wouldn't want to be an employee in this situation - life's too short to waste it collecting paychecks.

Raganwald wrote a neat piece a while back about uncovering the "hidden objection" and responding to that, instead of answering the sales prospect's verbal objection. People here are objecting to the money issue because it's obvious.

But it wouldn't even be an issue if it weren't for other problems with the startup. This is lead-management software with 2 bizdev guys on the team. It's totally unsexy. We don't know anything about the technical cofounder and what he's previously accomplished. It's unlikely that there'll be hard technical problems that'll provide a good learning experience.

If there were indications that the rest of the package was kick-ass, nobody would care about the money. But all the discussion so far has been about the money, so that's all we have to go on.
Yeah.

I'm starting to really wish I could downvote stories. Until this week, it never seems like a necessity. Now, we're flooded with stories that just don't seem like Hacker News. And I feel weird flagging them, since they aren't outright spam stories, they just aren't Hacker News.

This isn't as bad as the Dashboard story, though. That one's getting a wee bit out of hand.
Most teachers are not professors. Most teachers work for public schools in the k-12 arena. Many times tenure doesnt work out.

Teachers rarely get overtime, but overtime is necessary. The best teachers I know, and I know about 20, work 7-7. They work during the summer to setup curriculum, to tutor summer school students, to select books, to setup their classroom. And they do this all without any extra pay than their salary. They also supplement poor school budgets with their own money to buy supplies the students need to learn.

They are generally pressured to pay into a Teachers union that supports the misfits in their profession, and doesn't generally help them at all. These same awesome teachers are paid solely on the number of years they have been working -- not (at all) by performance, skill, or student/parent reviews. This translates into little reward for awesome teachers over not to awesome 8:15-3pm teachers.

But I digress.
IE will be more secure when Sun fix Java bug 6545701
They'd compete the same way they always do... by providing something (guarantee, etc.) the deregulated companies can't. It'll cost more to be "regulated," but that cost is passed onto the consumer. If the consumer puts X guarantee about price, boom, competing. If the consumer doesn't then that means X guarantee isn't necessary and it's time to stop being "regulated" before they go out of business.

Then again, even if regulation doesn't help at all, it's still a name; something familiar; something proven. Why do people by OEM hardware packaged by a familiar company at twice the cost when they could just buy it OEM?
Search Add-ons: Firefox Add-ons
Why does 'child pron' make it's way into every spammer/Internet bust story? I'm not saying it wasn't a part of this case, but it always seems tacked on to garner that extra emotional reaction from the public.
This is very valuable feedback. I really appreciate it (I'm wondering whether I'm still on everyone's down-mod list).
But if they're going for regulation, they're going about it entirely backwards. You don't start with a regulated service and deny others entry. You begin with an open market, allowing sites like these, and then other people create a niche business of offering reliability through the same venues.

Right? What am I missing?
So you problem is not processing 1.000.000 requests pr. minutes, but rather how to sort up to 60.000.000 items 1.000.000 times pr. minute? Now that could prove to be quite problematic. If your sorting algorithm only requires one processing instruction pr. stored item, and is perfectly parallelizable, and there's zero overhead in the map-reduce, you'll need 300 3 ghz cores to do it.
Ask YC: Good agile book?
I'm outside of Amazon coverage right now, but I'm going in there soon. What is the one book on agile development I should get? Also, how good is agile for teams of 2 or individuals?
Anybody else notice the irony that the current gen of OS X runs on x86, while the current gen of the Xbox is using a PowerPC variant? (And that, AFAIK, you can't install the old PPC OS X on a 360?)
Once you have kids, who might mistakenly choose an unlicensed unsafe taxi over a safe one, you might change your mind. Especially if it's your daughter - rape by unlicensed taxi drivers is a real risk.

This isn't about protecting joe from himself, it's about protecting vulnerable people who might make a poor decision just to save a bit of cash.

Similar to smoking - it's an expensive addiction (For the smoker and society) and should be actively discouraged. Also it's kinda nice not to have smokers blowing their smoke in mine+my kids faces any more.