skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Obviously, Uber doesn't prevent visitors from getting to the convention center directly; Uber isn't taking up spots at the cab stand at LGA. But if the "Uber way of doing business" effectively drives regulated cabs out of business, that's a problem.

I'm not clear on the "why" of your final sentence. Is it that no regulated cab companies could stay in business serving the airports? Or that Uber would eventually take over the airport traffic? Or that regulated cabs would be replaced by unregulated cabs at the airport?

As it stands, Uber seems to be supplying a market poorly served by extant firms.
Not sure I understand what you're saying here. Let's recap.

Someone posted a link to the Saylor site. That's prefectly reasonable, and it appears to be a perfectly valid site. It's not a scam, it costs nothing, but, as other comments point out, the content can be a little patchy.

The title the submitter used was "Get a free CS degree". That's not true, because as the site itself says, it's not accredited, so it can't award degrees. That doesn't detract from the content, but it does mean the title is wrong and misleading.

I posted a reply pointing out that the site itself says it doesn't give degrees.

So, what was your point?
American pi: US population passes 3.14159 million
Now I'm interested to know which languages exist that don't rely heavily on backslashes. I guess I can't think of a language that doesn't use blackslashes for string escapes. Some other uses off the top of my head:

* C -- line-continuations (important for macros).
* Perl -- regex back-references.
* Haskell -- anonymous functions.
* Python -- line continuation.
* Tcl -- line continuation.
* Icon -- non-null test (unary), generator limitation (binary).
* Prolog -- \+ for not provable.
* J -- the prefix adverb and the grade-down verb (\:).
* TeX -- Yes.
For anyone wondering what uber is: https://www.uber.com/cities#
I do like Gandi, they're quite pricey though. Shall have to compare prices across the board! Zerigo seem good though.
I've used the IKEA adjustable legs and frankly, setting a single leg to a specific length is a pain. Setting four legs to a specific length would be a larger pain, and doing so without turning the table to its side larger still. Not ideal when you're looking to slightly tweak the height of a table.
Thanks for dropping in.

As long as you're here, I'd like to bring to your attention a UX issue that might deeply impact first impressions. If you visit the site for the first time and click the play button, there's a good chance that, immediately following this click, the mouse cursor will stray into the code area.

This causes the code to turn white, and so the viewer just sits there listening to the lesson and watching things change in the running-program frame, oblivious to the fact that the code is invisibly changing, too (one of the coolest parts of the product).

You might want to unfade the code and get rid of the "Pause" button if the cursor hasn't moved in a while, to ensure first-time visitors don't miss the awesome code-to-audio syncing.

Other than that, I'm super impressed with the site.
Unfortunately though, you don't support .uk :(
I know I personally am happy to have read the OP's article. It made me aware of this backwards practice by 1&1, and I also learned that 1&1 stores these user passwords in plaintext. As a consumer of internet services, I will now steer clear of 1&1, and I have the OP to thank for the possible headaches I may have avoided.

I have no problem with someone standing up for what they believe in, taking a stand, and "rallying the HN troops" for what might be a relatively minor issue for most. I'm sure we all have made fusses about more trivial things :)
Laws don't change for the hell of it, certainly not because someone looks over the books and says "well thats silly". To get a law changed requires drawing mass attention to its silliness. Often times the best impetus is to get the public pissed off, taking away a service the public loves is a great way to piss them off.

Its a chicken and egg problem. There has to be igniting situation to get change to happen and a company can not operate 100% legally without the change occuring. As a result its sometimes in the company's best interest to ignite the fire themselves and eat any blow back.
No worries, happens.
I only hope the OEMs also offer the same hardware without Windows. Choice is good.

Unfortunately, all the mentions of Microsoft working together with OEMs in developing single-chip touchscreens and so on may indicate Microsoft will want to limit availability of competing devices with different OSs.

As always, everybody loses but them.
Interesting. Over the years, I've often played with the idea of letting someone invest in 'me' vs. my businesses. Here's why: if I take investment for a company, I have a conflict of interest with my investor. He/she wants the company to succeed, I want me to succeed and that could happen outside the company.

My style of doing business is very diversified. At any point I'm trying two or three different things, and retaining flexibility is an absolute priority. I need to be able to ditch business A and focus on business B whenever I see fir. This pretty much rules out regular investments because it leaves me too committed for my own good.

Another thought: I'd like to use such a platform as both a backer and a mentor. I'd like to back people who are an order of magnitude less successful than me, and get backing from people who are an order of magnitude more successful than me.

UPDATE: grammar correction
It's not that Uber itself would muscle out regulated cabs, it's that other firms operating under the same rules Uber secured for itself could. Like most people I find Uber itself to be benign.
Self-published books are lendable by default, and are subject to a lower royalty rate if lending is disabled. Most major publishing houses do not enable lending b/c they have negotiated separate contracts with Amazon that do not require it.
The Obvious Corp's preview of Medium
Unless they have the URL to your files, in which case, anyone can download your files.. similar to public DropBox files.

I think the "will ever be able to" verbiage is a bit misleading.
You shouldn't be making commits so monolithic that that becomes an issue.
Love the idea. If only they were accredited. I don't need to learn CS. I just need that piece of paper as I skipped a step and went directly into the workforce... shrugs
That's a nice technique and the explanation is good while remaining concise.
We do something similar at work (I work in finance) where our clients connect to a secure gateway using HTTPS but all communication with our other services are made using an unsecure protocol.
If it lives in your house then it's likely to be harmless!
love startups that set off to tackle a truly compelling, large-scale problem.
It's always great to see how America responds when times are tough. I have no doubt that the great minds of this country will put things back on track. This is the perfect example.
Something like that would certainly work - I was thinking a one-time code could be emailed to the email address on the account, but either way would be fine.

Given the relative simplicity, I wonder why nobody (at least that I know of) has implemented something like this?
Note that the JRE installs to /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/JavaAppletPlugin.plugin only, so it cannot easily be used by Java desktop applications and appears to be for applets only.

It also installs a System Preferences plugin that opens up a custom Swing-based settings panel that looks awful on a Retina MBP. It tries to replicate the look of the standard Apple Java Preferences app, but is confusing because it doesn't affect the system Java that you'd see when doing 'which java' from the command line.

The installer script then sets the permissions on /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/JavaAppletPlugin.plugin to root:wheel. This is the same as the bundled Java installations.
Cool service. A suggestion: let folks sign up with an email address (instead of just the google/facebook/twitter options you included).

It's super easy to add email accounts with this: https://www.dailycred.com (I'm a co-founder)
Uber, AirBNB and Food Trucks are interesting for two reasons:

1) They are on a collision course with the regulatory state.

2) Their employees are, by and large, young liberals.

Cab medallions are not much different in concept than wind and solar subsidies. In both cases, the government is picking a winner.

Our types of companies have been happily immune from the meddling of the regulatory state. As we crawl out into the real world we are dog-fooding the polices we voted for. Hopefully we will realize how bad they taste.
Isn't that just evidence that your commits aren't granular enough? Certainly, simply backing things up generally won't solve your problem, since good backup procedure can involve offsite storage being hours out of date.
I've never used it, but it seems to be a very nice way to keep track of such things. Thanks a lot for the suggestion!
LearnUp is a wonderful starup. Glad to see they're making waves!
That's why you "Inherit a codebase", as opposed to "Build a codebase". People who maintain and people who build are... well... they're just different people. We do need them both, but, they are different. Which is why we need them both.
I was thinking, "why not just buy a standing desk?" But then I saw the prices :-). Well, if you have the right tools, you can build quite a great adjustable desk, but you'll need more than IKEA. Off the top of my head, here's some things that you could use to build a manual or electric adjustable standing/sitting desk:

Metal tube - http://www.metalsdepot.com/products/alum2.phtml?page=tube... ;

Threaded rods - http://www.ebay.com/itm/3-4-6-x-3-ft-ACME-Threaded-Rod-Gener...

Gas springs (several of them would hold the desk pretty firmly, and you can adjust by pushing it down, with some locking mechanism in place) - http://www.ebay.com/itm/Two-USA-Made-Liftgate-Lift-Supports-...

Reduction motors - http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_trksid=p5197.m570.l1313&...

OR steppers (if you go all out) - http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=stepper+motor&_sacat...

I guess the work involved is not for everyone, but it could be a fun project :-)...
Unemployment + employers who can't find the right people to fill open jobs -> opportunity. Cool to see this approach to the skill gap!
Feels/seems like smallest federated wiki.
I merely intended to point out that if he intends to remark upon the disease, he should do so.
Spinning Klein bottle in WebGL; lighting Nd surfaces
What about Coursera?
I'm honestly feeling a bit petulant towards NASA for failing to include the mountain in their initial panoramas[1] -- they've missed 80% of the drama in that landscape!

It's very frustrating. It's as if NASA/JPL either don't know or don't care where their funding comes from, or how to get the stereotypical "man on the street" interested in what they're doing.

Hey, dumbasses: just before you launch something like this, put the best $1000 digital camera currently being manufactured on it. If the camera doesn't survive because it's not rated for use on Mars or whatever, fine. If it does, then that $1000 is going to pay for itself a million times over in firing up the public's imagination and garnering subsequent political support.

You know what? I'll bet James Cameron would help you out for free.
I believe this creates a centralized venue for prospective employees to show their motivation and fit for the job. That sounds like a great benefit to me!
Cherry MX mechanical keyboard switches compared, with audio
Keyboards with mechanical switches are prized by coders, writers, and gamers alike. Cherry's MX switches are the most popular on newer models; there are blue, brown, black, and red switches, each with their own tactile feel and audible click. We compare them all on four otherwise identical keyboards, complete with audio recordings of the keys in action. Recommended reading for anyone considering a mechanical keyboard.
Ironic example given that every medicinal marijuana dispensary in the country is operating in spite of Federal law. They only get away with it because the US government has decided to, at least for now, turn a blind eye.
The system clearly isn't fulfilling the needs of San Francisco consumers. But that doesn't logically imply that the only answer is to toss the regulations; instead, it could just mean that San Francisco needs to issue several hundred new medallions.

I'm not sure how simply certifying cabs overcomes information asymmetry here. The signal that competes with the certificate is "advertised price", but the whole point of cab regulations is ensuring that customers receive a predictable price and a safe, complete, timely carriage to their destination. Permission to solicit uncertified cab business seems like a license to prey on naive riders. It's clearly not in the state's interest for the market for transportation in the city to devolve that way.
The only problem with these kinds of things is getting traction - I've seen them done before, and yet I've never, ever seen anyone use them with their devices -- and this is a shame, because their usefulness will be apparent to anyone born after 1970 or anyone who has tried to take gaming on iOS seriously. Ever tried to play Madden or NBA Live on a touchscreen? Something is definitely missing.
There is an even better option that I would be fascinated to hear whether this blogger used: the Aviation Consumer Protection and Enforcement Airline Service Complaint form, or the "DoT complaint",

I had no idea there was such a thing. I'll file that data away, just in case.

Thanks!
airplay to your tv. it already is.
Vim had "extensions" before TextMate even existed.

I don't speak Ruby so I've never been able to alter much of anything in TextMate beside creating/customizing snippets in my 4 years of heavy usage (user ID in the lower 4 digits).

However, picking up vimscript for my small needs was relatively easy.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4366354
The link is to a proposal, rather than an announcement, but the replies seem very positive, which bodes well.
That's a little simplistic. They're also taking advantage of local and state laws that explicitly allow them to operate. There's no such arbitrage to be had in cab laws.
Tell it like it is Sean.....The Truth. Sean Penn
That sounds great. Thank you!

And as you already have an ePub version, I would like to suggest selling it (or giving it away free, as you already do) in the iBookStore as well. iPad is an amazing device for reading technical books, and I spend few hours every day reading ePub books in iBooks.app (I read Crockford's book and 3 other O'Reilly books just in the past 2 months).

Right now there are many Perl books in the iBookStore, but they're mostly cookbooks (step-by-step tutorial), not a no-bullshit introduction to the language as your book is! I'm sure many many more would discover or benefit from your book if it was available there as well :)
The fewer people have that kind of access, the better.
GLM: The Future of Logistics Software is Mobile (and Affordable)
They don't need to have your password in plaintext to verify it. They could just type it to verify it at their end.
Asking for it is still bad practice, though.
My Code Editor: A Workflow Realization
Facebook Tries Letting Pages Show News Feed Ads To Non-Fans
Ah, then I find that a wise and valid admonition.
Drawing? Animation? Games? ... "Wanna"?

Yes, this is how you bait a small child or idealistic young adult into wanting to "become a computer scientist when I grow up". Yes, it coerces pseudointerest in something. But, this isn't sustainable and it's not how participation in computing will be advanced.

Discrete maths aren't advertised by hyping up the life of a traveling salesman, and neither should computer science. The former attracts academics wishing to push bounds for humanity, fame, ego, etc.

Computer science is the youngest of the lot, so we ought to have no shortage of green kids studying and pushing understanding. Since we don't, I appreciate attempts such as this, but I think that history proves them to be misguided.
> This is why we rotate logs, archive them and trash them eventually.

i think an organization trashes old logs for out-of-band reasons - acquiring more disk space requires following an organization's procurement process which imposes tons of friction, or because compliance with applicable regulations requires saving, e.g., emails, for three months and saving them for longer is a legal risk.
Security enhancements, among other things.

Though, of course, you know better than clicking 'yes' on a random trojan installer, so maybe you don't need the security updates.
It is pretty confusing -- maybe we should invent a new acronym for use on HN.

>_>
Agreed. They may or may not store in plain text, that remains to be seen. Regardless, this is bad practice.
Thanks - glad you understand my point. It's just not good practice and the only way these things get change is if people complain, and HN is great community to do that with. I know online security is something we're all passionate. about.
Since you have already dismissed a well thought response, let's try irony instead:

"When you have spoiled ingredients, dispose 'em. Do not try to cover the bad flavor with condiments."
- Famous Master Chef.

"You see? Master Chef does not like condiments. They take away the natural flavor of the food and anyone who uses them is an idiot who never will be a true cook".
- Zealot Wannabe.
You can, but see below for my thoughts on that...
SeedTG is like a wider breadth yC clone focused on transgender founders, and is designed to bring down the high unemployment rate in the transgender community as a long term side effect of helping trans-owned businesses become successful. Seedtg.com/wordpress
From Germany With Love: Gorgeous Posters By Michael Schmid
Buried in this press release is support for ARM (and the Raspberry Pi)
I was thinking that this program is the bomb, but it's waiting for a trigger. Having a file with a certain name appear on the machine would be that trigger.
Not at all because programming languages like Ruby parameter names don't tell the full story:

if you have def find(name)
what kind of type could be name?
String "Steve"??
Symbol :Steve?
Hash {:first => "Steve", :last => "Jobs"} ??
I think this is the best way actually, and I've thought of it for the startup I work for, it'd be a really good authentication technique which could replace the password for support transactions with less/none of the security implications.
Obviously! However, I felt that used aircraft vs new flying car wouldn't be a fair price comparison.
"The original Ubercab model (allow anybody to sign up as a driver without any vetting of anything) was absolutely atrocious."

What about Lyft? Isn't that essentially what they're doing?
I hacked together a standing desk mode for my ikea galant:

http://www.jorgecastro.org/2011/12/09/the-43-ikea-galant-sta...

A word of warning for those of you who are thinking about doing this. I read all I could ahead of time about how to get the right height. At the time I didn't realize I was slouching, so when I measured and made the desk it was about 2cm too short.

I didn't realize until about a month later my left leg started getting numb due to a mild Sciatica. Adjusting it for the +2cm made all the difference in the world, so if you're going to do this make sure are standing up straight and your are not slightly looking down, and plan for adjusting the height to do microadjustments, it's a pain in the ass taking the thing apart because you mismeasured.

Either way I had no idea how to stand or sit right until I went to physical therapy and the lady showed me proper posture. Then when I went home I realized how messed up I was standing and sitting.

I learned all this _after_ I had made my standing desk, so either way if you make one yourself or get an adjustable talk to your doctor/PT-person/whoever who knows this stuff and have them show you how to do it properly.

Also, monitor arms to get those panels eye level, they make a huge difference!
I absolutely understand your point - but I think this is the worst of many bad solutions. It encourages bad habits and encourages people to think this kind of behaviour on websites is okay.

As for your second point, that is true - we just have to trust that that isn't happening, but that trust is implicit in day-to-day use of the internet.
Imagine for a moment you got into a taxi and instead of the meter, he had an hour-glass with tick marks on the side and a bike odometer. Would you feel secure about what you're being charged?

Most of the Uber drivers use iPhones, which (especially the older models) have notoriously bad GPS. If it skips off to the wrong street for a few blocks and adds 1/4 mile to my trip, and I don't notice by staring at his screen, how would I know? Normally, I trust the cab company because that little meter is tracked, registered, and supposedly regularly audited.
I'd like to see Kaspersky bust one of the Russian government-made viruses. I see them protecting customers from everyone else...
This is awesome. It's refreshing to see a company addressing a real problem. So pumped for this!
I think for the purpose of teaching people the basics of programming it's perfectly acceptable to leave them with a basic understanding of "You can only add numbers and strings." Then allow them to revisit the oddities much later after they have a much better understanding of what objects are. Honestly, I think it might be acceptable to just ask the student to explain to you how "object addition" would work. There are various ambiguous problems you could run into (concatenating two objects with the same property name but different values). I think this basic understanding is enough that even a novice would accept.

I think things like dynamic "this" in javascript will be more confusing for newcomers. But, once you start talking about "this", you should probably already have the basics down.

Edit:
With all that said, I'm not saying Javascript is a great language to learn programming with. But I don't honestly know of a single language that I would be perfectly comfortable telling people to learn with. Most languages have their own quirks.
My ideal scenario would be to have the student's code saved in a sideboard, while the teacher's code would take over the forefront. Sort of like a really minimalist branch feature.

If you could make it work with the layout, it would be really cool to have the student's code window physically move off to the side, indicating that the teacher was taking over, but their code would still be there whenever they wanted to get back to it.
i've been using something like this for about 6 months and it works great:

http://www.amazon.com/Espresso-Brown-Leaning-Bookcase-Booksh...
The point is simply that established practice is to never share passwords, and this eschews that practice. I can see your point, but they have a variety of other data they could use to verify who you are. This is about the worst idea.
I don't see this approach really able to solve the underlying problems that it references from

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/17/science/rise-in-scientific... and other articles.

"Each year, every laboratory produces a new crop of Ph.D.’s, who must compete for a small number of jobs, and the competition is getting fiercer. In 1973, more than half of biologists had a tenure-track job within six years of getting a Ph.D. By 2006 the figure was down to 15 percent."

I would claim that science requires some basic integrity in its practitioners and if an institution is treating it's members as so many throw-away resources, it is hard to expect those members to move ahead with great idealism. The model of every desperate competitor watching every other competitor seems to be the replacement for model of science as a high ideal. I don't see it working out well.
Video: The Design of NASA's Mars Curiosity
Python in 30 Days - Day 4 (with code)
Why Code Assumptions are Bad - Quarks with Android's CheckBoxes and ListViews