skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I personally like the model "try to do something illegal and then complain on the Internet". When people realize the laws are wrong, they'll change them. (Remember how epically SOPA failed? Awareness is a key catalyst for change and many laws are for special interest groups rather than general interest.)

But even ignoring that, this article is crap. It basically claims that taxi licensing exists for safety and that Uber is jepordizing the safety of the average man for the benefit of the out-of-touch Silicon Valley elitist. Using facts to support this view, however, is difficult as there are none. Uber uses licensed car services that are licensed to transport passengers but not to pick up people without a certain amount of notice. The law that's being broken is saying "I want a car now" when the law says you have to say "I want a car in one hour" or otherwise hail a medallion vehicle. Presumably the licensing process for drivers of cabs and car service cars is around the same (drivers must not rape their passenger, to use the example from the article).

The worst side effect of letting car services pick up passengers immediately is that the artificial value of taxi medallions will return to its true value of zero dollars, making a lot of people very poor very quickly. There is an argument to limiting the number of cabs as a traffic-calming measure, but there is really no reason to discriminate based on vehicle type -- just implement a congestion charge and everything will work itself out.

Anyway, I like to see counterpoint articles on HN so I'm glad this was posted. But writing a whiney blog post about how Uber is sticking it to the poor man is tiresome.
I'll piggy back on you comment, since mine is very similar. I don't see this as a worthwhile product for more than a year. This is purely speculative but Apple will implement this tech themselves, if it catches on, or they'll release something similar and exclusive to the iPhone (highly doubt the latter). My gut tells me that iPhone 6 will roll out with NFC, and this product will die the second it does.
A few points of order:

1. My first high-level language was Common Lisp (clisp).

>My point is that in certain scenarios where you need performance but aren't willing to pay the C++ grief, you can get away with better languages without significantly sacrificing.

2. And? I expressly said that when you need to be able to squeeze every last ounce and have total control over the behavior of the program and that's when this discussion became relevant. Close only counts in hand grenades and horseshoes. I'm talking about systems work.
no intentions really. just being observational. as you said - the status quo is quite evident. Also - I am curious if Peter Thiel has a stake in Y comb??
The FloJack aims to support the NFC ecosystem. It's hw compatible with any device with a 3.5mm audio jack. It's the smallest -and lightest- full fledged NFC reader on the market. And it's available for anyone to buy (unlike enterprise-only icarte, devicefidelity, twinlinx, roamdata, etc with their "ask for quote" bs)
PayPal generally has horrible exchange rates, often to the point that a 3% fee with your bank's rates is cheaper.
I wrote a very nearly identical letter. After closing my account, they continued to send mr marketing spam with a broken unsub link. I had to write another letter requesting to not receive their spam.
The US doesn't have military bases in Australia. The closest things would be Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap and Naval Communication Station Harold E. Holt. There's now 2500 US Marines on permanent rotation in Darwin but they are stationed at Robertson Barracks.
United still has this feature. Choose "pay at the airport" and then just go back and pay online within 24 hours.
Just a quick note to you and others who seem to be under an incorrect impression: I remember working with Jacques on a university project, and, in my opinion, he did not (and - based on comment history - still doesn't) fall into the "non-technical" bucket.
This is an interesting idea, but a flawed premise. The point of using an analogy is to make analysis simpler. This analogy does clearly [not] do that.

edit. for clarity.
Hotspots for Obama
Of note, I meant segmented sleep[1] as per the wikipedia definition, which though polyphasic (biphasic) isn't really trying to cut on time but just allow our bodies to reset to more natural patterns. The pill I'm taking as a kid has wheels on her bike till she can ride without.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segmented_sleep
Great list. However, these are things you should work on before your twenties. You need to get an early start!
Nice. I'm stealing this line. :-)
> Golang is militantly anti-event; it doesn't even offer a select primitive! Just alternating read/write on two different sockets seems to demand threads!

Go only blocks the goroutine. It uses native event primitives (epoll/kqueue/etc) under the hood so that IO is non-blocking to the rest of the process (e.g. other goroutines). You said you have used Go for 2 months, so I assume you are aware of that.

So..can you be more specific about what you were talking about in that statement?
I think it's hilarious how the little guy buys into Ayn Rand am regurgitates this nonsense. Ayn Rand does not have your back. The Only people for whom it makes any sense to believe in Rand's ideology are those very same people who are skewing the odds that you rail against. Unless you're worth a few million (at least) then you are the greater fool if you believe in Randianism.

Not very law and regulation is a huge conspiracy and in fact, most of the very unnecessary and self serving ones were created by Randians for Randians. Everyone hates the RIAA around here so I think they're the perfect example of this.

I really love how Randians selectively pick and choose examples to support their ideology that just happen to be totally hypocritical. If you read Ayn Rand without trying to fit it into your personal ideology it comes off sounding like it was written by a narcissistic sociopath (redundant, I know. Sociopaths are already narcissists)
It's brittle, opaque, and relies on Marshal, an interchange standard nothing else uses. It's so easy to build alternatives to Drb that use better interchanges that nobody uses Drb. And once you do that, you find it's easy to back your system with Redis or a database, which you do because it makes sense, and then you start getting pulled towards message architectures --- which are themselves usually superior to direct invocation of remote methods.
What Americans don’t know about H-1B visas could hurt us all
Try: http://www.cnbc.com/id/49540593

Interesting article, I liked this part:

"The compartments do not have labels reading “Germany’s gold” and so on. They are instead numbered, and only a few people at the Fed know what numbers correspond to which country. The Fed says it does this to protect the privacy of the depositors. But this also makes actual inspection less reliable. There’s no way for Germany to know that the gold it is being shown is Germany’s, as opposed to some other depositor’s. In an extreme case—which I have no reason to believe is true—miscreants at the Fed could just show everyone who came to visit the same pile of gold."
Maybe it wasn't a good analogy, but I think the premise--underrepresentation begets underrepresentation and a whole slew of other problems--is pretty sound.

Also, did you a word?
Facebook Has Decided That I Am Not Interested In My Wife
Profit, obviously.
...explain? I honestly don't understand what happened. How does promoted posts tie in?
Apple is probably going to launch it in its next generation or the one after that... why would some one buy a 3rd party component after that.. I don't think anyone buys a bluetooth dongle for an iPhone just cause it lets them do more things...
I'm still trying to figure out the point of this article. I think the author is trying to discredit Travis Kalanick and Uber by associating them with Ayn Rand, but the argument seems to backfire.

Besides the fact that the article is annoyingly snarky, it just doesn't make good arguments. There are much better ways to criticize Uber than raving about some Ayn Rand connection. The writing meanders through several topics, but seems to be just grasping at threads. The author wants us to believe that Travis is some sort of Objectivist Fundamentalist, but fails to tie them together with anything more substantive than a Twitter profile picture and three year old forum post.

However, I do have to give him credit for creative character assassination. He includes lots of suggestive anecdotes (e.g. caricaturing Travis as "downright adolescent"), re-educates us with some condescending philosophical mischaracterizations (though he seems rather desperate in his attempts to portray Rand as the Worst Person In The World), and tops it off with some complete non-sequiturs (like trying to convince us that, hypothetically, if faced with Airbnb's problems, Travis would've ruined everything, all because of Ayn Rand).

I honestly can't tell if this article was motivated more by the author's hate of Travis or his hate of Ayn Rand. I imagine he already hated Travis, but upon noticing Travis' twitter icon, became irate and penned this screed.

My favorite part:

> Worse still, Rand inspired Paul Ryan, The Tea Party and the Koch Brothers.

You read right -- Uber is basically The Tea Party. So overall, I think the author does a better job of discrediting himself than anything else.
I was playing this game all afternoon. Ten I came home and turned my phone off silent. Wow. The attention to detail in the sound effects want me to go back to my review and give it another star.
Sounds complicated. Why not use one of the hundreds of I2C and SPI ADC options available on digikey?

A simple PCB in the picrust form factor could implement a high quality multichannel ADC IC, with no microcontroller programming required.

And as a bonus, you'd be able to design it with sane connectorization for your actual application. (eg, appropriate scaling resistor your sensor, tidy two-wire plug or screw terminal, etc)

I'm very pleased that the RPi has stayed focused on not being everything to everyone, and has left these specialized applications to be implemented as peripherals.
It doesn't sound like a cache at all. Think of it like their old "hotfiles" relocation to the faster part of the disk, only now they're relocating the blocks from entire files to the faster volume in the corestorage group.
Algorithmic Typography, Crafted Entirely With Computer Code
or tim at flomio dot com
http://dangerousminds.net/comments/facebook_i_want_my_friend...
> Golang is militantly anti-event; it doesn't even offer a select primitive

s/anti-event/anti-callback/. They are not the same thing. Under the hood, Golang is doing the eventing and select() for you, while letting you write simple procedural code.

> I try to force myself to write socket code like I did when I was 13, reading a line, parsing it, and writing its response, but that code is brittle and harder to follow than a sane set of handler functions.

How is simple, procedural code hard to follow? Even the way you write it sounds simple "read, process, write". That is really more hard to follow than a series of onRead, onWrite callbacks?

> I'm not arguing that evented code is the best answer to every problem

No, but like many others you seem to be confusing and conflating call-back driven code with event-loop based code. Everyone agrees on the benefits of event loops over kernel threads. Not everyone agrees that call-backs are the best interface to event loops - more and more people are switching on to green threads (which look just like normal threaded code) as the best and simplest interface to the event-loop - as seen by Golang, gevent, Eventmachine, Coro (Perl) etc etc.
I wanted ZFS as much as anybody, but NetApp did push the state of the art in some areas of filesystem design and the first thing everybody who used NetApp said when they heard about ZFS was "cool, it's like a NetApp". Sometimes it's not trolling; it's just enforcing your rightful patents.
There are times when you might reach for select() not to scale the whole program, but because for instance you're trying to hot potato data from a Reader to a Writer.

Obviously, the whole of Golang's concurrency model is lightweight threads scheduled on I/O events. But that's not exposed to the programmer; in fact, it's hermetically sealed away from the programmer from what I can tell.

So now you know what I meant by that statement.
Songkick Detour: Prepay bands to come to your city
We use it at Rackspace under our Cloud Databases service. Check this out (high level)

http://c1776742.cdn.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/downloads/...

I think one reason it is not more common is because there are fewer people with expertise and it is more sophisticated (read complex).
Samsung is Faulted over Patents
Google invites Chrome users to checkout Firefox and Opera.
That's a good perspective. I'm enjoying this thread because both sides make solid points I can agree with. Which highlights to me the challenge inherent to the position Facebook finds itself in.
Actually, it seems there is no explanation as to what happens if you choose to opt out. I imagine they are required o ask you by law, but that's why they are trying hard not to make it very obvious.
Real evented code isn't a series of onRead/onWrite callbacks, because real evented code buffers strategically, and abstracts itself into state machines with simple callback interfaces, so that the rest of the program can be written in terms of higher level events.

I don't want to turn this into "events work for every program", because like I said above: I don't think event interfaces work for all kinds of programs. I've found them poorly suited to full-featured web frameworks, for instance.

I did not predict this incredibly boring "evented runtime vs. evented API" controversy, but will dispense with it by saying that it is incredibly boring, so you win it in advance. :|
Gallerists to the People
A broken unsubscribe link? Why, that must be an honest mistake by the good folks at PayPal. </sarcasm>
Ask HN: Surface Pro as a development machine
I am going to purchase a new laptop for my development (mainly python). Because I would like to travel more next year, I want to get a very portable one. Should I wait for Surface Pro?
It really depends. I know web sites that are super snappy and apps that are dog slow.

And I would wager the minimum possible startup time is actually smaller for a web page than an app. Apps usually take at least a second or two to open for me, and Google has their page load time down below a second, right?

Either way, your choice of platform is not going to be the thing that prevents you from building a fast app. It's going to be your failure to use the architecture well.
The article isn't crap and you're too focused on the wrong part of it. You're missing the bigger point. It wasn't about whether the laws that Uner had trouble with we're justified or not, it was about how Disruptive startups try to paint any and all regulation and laws as unjustified despite there often being merit to them. It's about not being a cry baby and just because you label yourself Disruptive doesn't mean that the rules don't apply to you.

At the same time yes there are laws that are laughable and truly need disruption. It's a real fine line to walk and this article points out the danger in the Randian attitude. I personally think that Rand did have some good points. Unfortunately the entire ideology is entirely one-dimensional and self-serving to the point where it ignores any and all counter arguments even if they really are more correct. This kind of mentality is dangerous in the same way religion is dangerous. Or can be dangerous. On the one hand you have you the moderates who are all about the good parts and loving everyone but stop short of holy war. On the other hand you have the zealots who take every word of their book as objective fact and will blow up a building to remind you.

Not everyone believes what I believe. Luckily, my beliefs do not require them to.
Business Travelers Rush to Mobile, Leaving Managers Behind
Stanford Alumni Create Nearly 3 Trillion in Economic Impact
Paypal is pretty evil, but I can't think of a single successful company, ever, who started spamming their own customer's mobiles
I remember Silicon Valley after the crash very well. Tough times. Good job finding a productive way out of it at such a young age without a degree. I got a job when my dot com went bust - very stressful times.
That may have been true initially, but according to a Square employee I talked to the reader actually has a battery and encrypts the card number before sending it to the phone. Also, each reader has a unique key.
My best advice is just go and watch the BOS videos, I have been blown away. Their videos beat any conference on tech entrepreneurship in my opinion. I measure this based on substance. The Clayton Christiansen talk alone is worth more than watching all the startup school 2012 videos! This is just my opinion.

PS: Already a down vote. Be man or woman enough to state your case.
The use of the term "thought crime" may have been deliberate, but that does not make it apt. I was in no way claiming to know what the author believes or thinks, only what their words have to offer--which I was summarily disappointed with. I'm sorry if my comment "seemed" to be carrying "loaded" or "knee-jerk" terminology, but after a long period of reading the same anti-woman dreck over and over in tech-related blogs one feels responsible to point it out on occasion.

To suggest that the existence of more extreme cases of misogyny supersede the need to make note of lesser cases is a weak and breathless deflection. The idea that any criticism is "outrage" may make you feel justified in your sensitivities, but doesn't take away from my initial assertion. As I attempted to say elsewhere my problem is not that the analogy fails to be gender neutral, but that it is boring.
I feel like this has been said of the past two iPhones & now with the iPad mini - there is no clear indication Apple is going to support NFC in the near term. Why do you feel this way?
You're correct about the current state of payments in Canada, but many Canadian banks are now issuing Visa debit cards similar to the debit cards issued by American banks.
The ideology can be summed up to refusing to live at someone else expanse, and refusing that people life at your expanse.

It goes both ways, and I need no one to back me up. I am happy with my ideology, and I won't be coerced into anything I won't do out of my free will - with or without money. That is true freedom.

BTW even stretching that definition very far, I fail to see how it can include the RIAA, which lives at the expanse of our legal system, and which makes a lot more people life at its expanse.

Information goods are not in the domain of economy (even if some like to say they are non rival and non excludable like a public good) - they are not scarce resources.

And the free software movement has show that no special incentive was required to produce high quality information goods.

The answer to the RIAA is in the market - in the artists around us whose work we enjoy and can financially support. kickstarter movements now make that possible.
World's Geekiest Bar Now Open In Paris
Please editorialize on your blog, not HN submission titles.
The same could be said about your comment. Touché.
I think you need a good way to resolve this problem.
So I recomended you this article.

http://www.epubsoft.com/how-to-remove-drm-from-azw-on-kindle...
because NFC is the way of the future. so much potential. how could they not.
Tell me again what's wrong with RSS for update notification?
We can see Apple typically releases any new technology a few years later. NFC came into mainstream only last year so it might take a few more years for it to be widely used for applications. Apple made a safe bet with passbook because all the store cards/tickets use similar bar codes or QR codes. A few startups have started on software/hardware lacking in Apple products but once the manufacturer integrates it into their product, they risk losing their purpose if they don't innovate. They integrated LTE after a few years it became mainstream. This will eventually happen too.
http://businessofsoftware.org/ in case anyone's left wondering.

Videos 2012: http://businessofsoftware.org/category/video-2/
Ah! I was thinking the less common pure vs applied sciences contention :)
Thanks for elaborating :) Good points.
there are videos to watch with no signup, I have been watching them on bliptv and there are also summaries of the videos which helped me keep notes.
This is absolutely fantastic feedback and advice and it gives me a new possible road to take. Thank you. I might be misunderstanding something, but the main thing I wanted to do which a tweet-bot wouldn't is start conversations with the "bad back" person and the chiropractors. Even one or two messages back and forth could answer a question where a bot would come short, for instance "I hurt a muscle around my left shoulder blade lifting weights. Is this a normal athletic case for you to work on? If so would I need an initial x-ray? Do you take insurance and when is the earliest you can fit me in?" If the hurting back person was able to get a few chiropractors to answer these question then they could make a much better buying decision.
If you're serious about your business, I would advice against contest sites such as 99designs. I sometimes participate in there out of pure boredom and to be honest I wouldn't buy my own logos. The problem with these sites is quality. The logo is the face of your business, you need a designer that's going to dedicate time and effort; a designer who cares about your business and understands branding concepts and design best practices, not just how to create a pretty logo. Logos don't have to be pretty, they have to be memorable and adaptable, that's the key.

You see, on speculative sites like that, where 99% of designers don't have a chance to win, people don't put any thought or effort into their work (including me) because for most of them it's not worth it. Most logos on 99designs are cliche, not print ready, and most of the time plain bad.

On these sites you have to think about players, not designers. Like Poker, the more players there are the less chances of winning you have, therefore you feel less confident, bet small and don't risk. Hardcore players will exploit all the known tricks and cliches to impress clients and win a contest. But what most clients don't understand, from my experience, is that a logo doesn't have to please them, it has to please their target audience.

If you want to build a successful image for your business, find a designer that you can trust and talk to. Go online, look for designer's portfolios, contact them to get a quote and go from there. Also understand that when hiring a freelance designer it's not "work for hire", it's a collaboration, and that's what those sites can't offer, and will never be able to.
And odds are the guys that wrote this paper don't have any clue that even if those writing the CLI tools/libraries/frameworks that use SSL had locked them completely down, developers and sysadmins would write scripts to agree-to-all, fake auth, etc. to get around security, because we have jobs that have to get done and security is not what we are all paid to do. Security is only critical when it fails. People claim to want security. They may even have an office of security. But even if that office of security is scanning all the apps, taking production apps down because they didn't throttle their probes, and maybe even looking at code- they cannot do the job of the developer.

It is destined to be flawed as long as insecurity is allowed. Only when every exploit is exploited continously will people be vigilant.