skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
London cab drivers demonstrate your point precisely: a lot of specialized training is required, but they're all identical. A somewhat expensive commodity, but a commodity nonetheless.
What's with the absurd comment?

We don't even know if the valuation is $100 million. "Well-over" $50 million could be $60 million. I'd reserve my judgement until the final number is confirmed. Maybe the final number is $100 million. Maybe not. When a reporter says "And we’ve heard" you can translate that to they heard a rumor.

Is it some sort of tax evasion scheme? Are you intentionally throwing out absurdities?

In a certain light, this acquisition might make sense from a strategic, rather than ROI, point of view: my guess is that Dropbox thinks Mailbox will be the email app for mobile, just as Gmail became the the email web service for Google. Gmail doesn't really turn any significant profit AFAIK, yet Gmail makes sense because it strategically anchors Google's entire ecosystem. In that sense, Mailbox might become part of an ecosystem of productivity/collaboration tools that Dropbox creates.
The press don't care because of structural reasons not because of a belief system common to Americans. Press reporting is systemically biased in favor of powerful interests that influence them by carrot and by stick.
IonicDB NoSQL Database Engine Written In Python
"A large group ..."

I count 25 (or 24 if the guy at right-rear has big hair) people in the picture and I suspect that if there were more than that, they'd have made sure to squeeze them into the shot.

A small group (proportionally) if you look at the number of drivers Uber has. And do they really represent drivers from the other cities served by Uber or is that wishful thinking.

"They don’t have the balls to come down and talk to us" ... maybe because they're busy dispatching thousand of drivers to waiting customers? If Uber is really that hard on the drivers, why don't they work elsewhere? They have no contract, so they're free to go.
People I know who ask me why this mattered and why I used it seem to understand it when I explain it this way: Imagine being able to know when your favorite websites are updated, what that update is, follow the blogs or articles of your favorite writers, and not be limited to what some strangers decided they thought was kewl and up or downvoted.

A lot of people just didn't know you could have a service like Google Reader.

Following any more than a couple sites without this type of service, where you have to bookmark and visit the sites daily or periodically, makes it feel like you're changing channels on a TV without a TV guide view. Which is one reason why sites like this and reddit are so prominent.
P&G found guilty of Reverse Domain Name Hijacking
...and lied about it

Here's a link for the panel decision:
http://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/search/text.jsp?case=D2012-2179
I haven't used it in San Francisco, but I use DC Uber all the time, and I too have had the same response. That said, I would expect most employees to say good things about their employers, even if that weren't the case.

I know I personally wouldn't ever say anything negative about my employer, even though I personally haven't any cause to.
> Why do we assume that we need "free time"?

Two reasons:

* For better or worse, humans are not machines. We can only keep doing the same thing over and over for so long before we go crazy, somewhat like Chaplin in Modern Times [1]. Creative work is somewhat less tedious than assembly line work, but there's still a limit.

* Because "non-free" time is time you spend making somebody else happy: Your boss, customers, friends or family, or society at large, e.g living up to expectations that you ought to be successful. Somewhere in there you need to make room to make yourself happy as well, it's not possible to live a life merely by attempting to live up to other people's expectations.

> I take it as implicit that the one thing the elite players are not doing in their "free time" is playing music or that would obviously be a form of practicing.

That doesn't follow. The kind of practice that makes you better is the boring stuff - playing scales and working on your technique. Doing fun stuff like playing your favorite tunes may be part of the training, but it's not the kind of training that improves your skills.

To keep learning, you need to keep pushing yourself into new unfamiliar territory, and to stay focused on mastering it while you're there. And we generally can't stay that focused for more than a couple of hours at a time.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wENE7O-Y6ME
IANAL or a procedural expert, and more importantly I have not read all the filings so far, but my understanding is that the tension between steps B and C goes like this:

B) ISP files suit, argues 'this ain't constitutional, we shouldn't have to comply.' DoJ disagrees.

C) FBI counter-files, asserting that even if ISP prevails in step B), it should comply in the meantime rather than temporize pending the outcome. I can understand why they would, since they may in good faith consider time to be of the essence in obtaining the information they seek - which is part of their job, after all.

I'm not that troubled by D, insofar as undercover operations realistically require a degree of secrecy. What was troubling about the NSL regime was that it asserted this secrecy by default; I expect that in the future the government will still get NSLs but will first go through something like the FISA court and essentially ask a court for a gag order, presenting evidence under seal. This is IMHO how it ought to have been from the start.
Whenjobs: a powerful but simple cron replacement
I never found a Reader I liked until I began using KDE's <b>Akregator</b> (works fine in Mint XFCE as well) a few months ago. Very easy to use and add feeds to (nerdship not needed). I follow three-dozen podcasts and blogs daily ... impossible without it.
Right now, it could be a list of all invitations that come from non-google domains. I assume they could do better than that over time, but my point is that "decline and log for review" is an option whenever "decline alone" is. On review, you could whitelist the false positives.
"I'm in the business of building things that have never been done before,"

If only the government would get out of the hero entrepreneur's way so he and his fellow Bay Area/Boston/Chinese/Indian/Nordic/Eastern European/<insert leftist area> engineers could bring their unique vision to life.

"I value economic freedom"

For today's GOP "economic freedom" translates to lower taxes for rich people, carte blanche to piss in the pool, and closing economic doors for the less fortunate.

"good governance "

Turning the government over to lobbyists, destroying public education, weakening clean air and water standards, ignoring global warming, starting pointless wars, neo-creationism, disenfranchising hard fought voting rights, monetary crankism, opposing any and all reasonable regulation of firearms, etc. None of these sound remotely like "good governance". The Democrats are no saints but the modern GOP is repugnant on many fronts.

"But it's sad that we get no civil liberties either way (unless people like Rand Paul get their way)."

As bad as Obama is on civil liberties he stopped torture that went on under GOP and he tried to close Guantanamo but was prevented by the GOP. At the end of the day, presidents of all parties tend to vote for more executive power. For the parties themselves, it's progressives that have been the best defenders of civil liberties and that can be seen clearly in something like the Patriot Act votes.
I started coding in grade 9, but I went to university for medical science, got good grades, did some research, and intended to go to medical school. But, the closer I got to graduation, more and more I started to realize there was no way I was ever going back to school--I just wanted to code and make things. No regrets.
I came to a similar conclusion with something that I'm building so I realised to focus on the people with inbuilt audiences on social media & their web presence (creators, charities, product makers, etc). Rather than building another marketplace.
In an addition to an upfront payment, if you have can figure out a way to break the project up into multiple deliverables/checkpoints with some payment due proceeding to the next, that helps both you and your client.
>An app that would let me dump all high volume blogs and Twitter into the same bucket would be awesome!

That's what google reader did for me, I subscribe to twitter feeds through RSS, label them (and other high-volue blogs) with a tag "noise", so I can easily mark them all as read.

Of course, Twitter is trying to kill RSS too, subscribing to new feeds doesn't seem to work.
Hacked 911 call sent a SWAT team to a security reporter's house
I second this - I've had great success using just Cloud9 for development and pushing to GitHub/Heroku
You are not your thoughts. You are not your actions. Your are not your memories, your past, or your future or your abilities.

However, you are part of a process. You don't own the process and even you do everything perfectly things might not turn out right, but you can understand what happened and how to influence things for the better in the future.

It is rather freeing.
Can anyone verify that Uber isn't requiring commercial liability insurance from their drivers anymore? If so, that's a huge deal.
Any reason why the export period is so short? The archive team is trying to make a backup of the site at the moment.

Any help would be appreciated on EFnet IRC channel #firespring or #archiveteam

Archive team projects: http://archivingyoursh.it/Current_Projects
When was that ever not the case? Even FDR, the most socialist president we ever had, implemented the extremely regressive Social Security taxes.
The Gmail user could add the account to their contacts without sending an email. Hell, they could send an email to a nonexistent jabber address to whitelist the account (which might be easier than adding the account manually for some people). As long as the email doesn't have to go through...
It's not as simple as you state. Uber gets a lot of the business so the drivers won't have work without them. That 4.7 is out of 5 also and it is true about the terminations. I have witnessed the mass firings and how they are handled.

Drivers also can't dispute their ratings so it takes one person to give them a one star which could lead to being fired. And can you truly say all customers are fair in their ratings?

The best thing that could happen for these drivers is having another company open up to compete against uber. Then they wouldn't be a commodity.

If they were not "taxi drivers" than everyone would be furious at how they are treated.
"Well-over" $50 million could be $60 million

You say that as if $60 million would be any less absurd?

Is it some sort of tax evasion scheme? Are you intentionally throwing out absurdities?

No. Companies tend to do really weird[1] things to avoid taxes.

I'm honestly trying to wrap my head around these kind of deals (color was the textbook example, but it's not like there's a shortage on them).

[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/new-twist-i...
I republic is a form of democracy. There is no such thing as a pure democracy, so making that distinction is a little meaningless.
> below 4.7 and you go on probation

This brings up a related point. For a typical Uber ride, do you give the driver 3-stars or 5-stars?

I usually give 5-stars when a ride goes smoothly. But I know people who default to 3-stars (average) unless the driver goes out of his way & is exceptional.

I've considered switching my default to 4-stars for a nice ride, leaving me a 1-star buffer for exceptional service. But using that scale, I wouldn't want a 4.7 driver to get dinged.
Pagination: You're (Probably) Doing It Wrong.
He wasn't talking about homunculus, if that's what you mean, but I didn't imagine there could be confusion about what he meant.

It's basically like thinking about the kids that could have had if you had descendants with person A instead of person B. There's nobody around to be disappointed for not being born, but those who got be alive are "lucky" in a certain sense of the word.
If you're using a gmail domain email, setup auto reply/forwarding for a few months/indefinitely.

Businesses would largely be using their own domains, so the point is moot.
I'm disappointed to see the study focus only on gun violence. I think if someone is determined to inflict harm on themselves or another person they will tend to use the most effective and expedient means of doing so at their disposal. I'd prefer to see the study examine violence in general.
So, my big question is: "Where does 100% completing everything you start doing during a day fit in with two other well-repeated arguments?" in particular,

* 40 hours a week is the max sustainable work week length
* To help get started work the next day so you're not
wasting time as the day starts and so your subconscious
can work on it, start your last task of the day and get
through working on a good part of it; and then stop
before finishing it.
Not trolling - but can someone who feels this way please explain the notion of disgust at this price?

The way I see it, it's the shareholders' money / assets that are being used here. I'm not saying they are making a good decision; I am saying that I think the wise-ness of the decision feels fairly irrelevant to me.

It could be the case that people feel that the Mailbox founders are undeserving of this reward. Or, perhaps it's the case that people feel a sense of outrage when things (even when the things are not theirs) are mismanaged in their opinion.

The way I feel is that this price is an indication that something like Mailbox is very valuable -- perhaps more valuable than I previously thought -- and it's an indication to the "market" to make more things like Mailbox.

And as far as the economic rationale for this purchase, I see a variety of ways it could end up being a great deal for Dropbox. Perhaps it will add significant functionality to the core product that will drive user acquisition, or maybe it will drive increased utilization and convert existing users -- even if no one ever pays a dime for Mailbox the app, it could end up making Dropbox a lot of money. Or, it could not, but as an option on the potential (and having no way to value this myself), perhaps 100m was the right price.
Why is the prevailing attitude in these comments "they have no contract with Uber, they should leave if they don't like it"? Many people in tech have at-will contracts yet when we get articles on HN about bad work conditions we don't just say "well then quit!". I do agree that in the long term these unhappy drivers should look for a different source of income but for now they clearly need uber and as such it's not unfair of them to express their distaste for certain things uber does until they find a better place to work.
I upvoted you, but while we are nitpicking: "a little meaningless" is quite like saying "a little pregnant" ;-)
Poorly named co

got smashed by a Quora.

Name or app to blame?
If you'd like to sell the domain to a broke student I'll pay $100 for it. Either way, hopefully the future will shine upon you!
Aaron Swartz to Receive Posthumous Freedom of Information Award
CIA: Some Far-out Thoughts on Computers
Okay, why did I write Qbix? What I meant was bazqux [1] and I just got a mail that list view in all is now available and they are thinking about offering a more condensed view :)

[1] http://bazqux.com/
@pinwale Starting March 31st, no new content will be created on Formspring. The site will be in read mode only. Ping me tim {at} formspring.me if you want more info.
This kind of attitude is so insulting to me. Go walk into any minimum wage job or factory job and say this to people there with a straight face.

This is privileged people mistaking their privilege for the reason for their success instead of a result of it.
And (a) explicitly not constitutional in that it attempts to bypass the limits knowingly placed upon government by the people. An order to bypass auditors is never valid, especially from government.

That you think this is okay is scary. But this is why we need to remember that the law is an imperfect rendering of our intent, not the other way around.
Call me when Quora has 30 million users ;-)

But more seriously, the name Formspring originates from what Formspring used to be, and has been renamed Formstack: http://www.formstack.com.
Kudos also to the unnamed telecom company that went out of their way to fight this, and the EFF for fighting the good fight. Don't forget to donate to them.
If I am leaving EC2 to another cloud provider, one of the reason I can think of is Linode start offering real cloud instance..
No offense, but in which universe does copy-and-paste require nerdship?

(Do we really need more people online who can't handle that or find someone to help them?)
How about the unlawful use of torture by the prior regime? This stuff goes back a ways, are you going to put every living former commander in chief on trial?
Exactly - and such legislative overreach is often rebuked and/or set aside by the courts. But legislation is not required to be pre-certified as Constitutional before it is passed by Congress or signed by the President. This is probably a good thing, because otherwise it would be much more difficult to bring challenges on unforeseen grounds that manifested after the legislation had gone into force, and you'd have a legislative dictatorship.

As for the DoJ, my understanding is that as an executive branch agency it has the obligation to make the most of its power to execute the laws on behalf of Congress. The amount of discretion available to the Attorney-General varies from law to law; the executive can't just abdicate its own power.

Now, the Obama administration has filed briefs arguing that the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional for the upcoming case in the Supreme Court. Isn't that the exact opposite of what I'm saying above, you might ask? My answer to that would be no, because in the meantime it is still implementing DOMA; for example, by forbidding gay couples to file taxes as a married couple even if they married under state law. If I were married to a partner of the same sex, and we filed a joint tax return, the IRS would write back and say 'you can't do that.' If I then sued the government, they would be obliged to defend the suit and stand up for DOMA until such time as the Supreme Court overturns it (if they ever do). The administration's brief to the Supreme is a non-binding policy suggestion about how the constitution should be interpreted, which the Justices may choose to ignore. The administration's brief in my hypothetical lawsuit against them would be arguing for the application of the law as it currently stands, not as the administration might wish it to be.
You know people use 3-star average for Uber? That surprises me.

One of my earlier Uber rides I decided to go ahead and rate 3 stars because I felt it was a fairly average ride. Pretty quickly I got contacted by someone at Uber who wanted to ask me what was wrong with my ride. When I explained that I felt it was merely average, they told me a simplistic version of what jamiequint said, that they only want to work with the best drivers and therefore 3 isn't an average rating, it's actually a bad rating.
What exactly were these drivers doing before Uber showed up?
I'd count anything neutral as negative. Something I have noticed is that many UberX drivers were formerly UberBLACK drivers. Not sure why though.
I'm not in the startup scene at all and if I were, I wouldn't expect that working for free would magically lead to success, but why is a bad idea to work strictly for experience - assuming you have some idea of what "good" experience would be? What's an example of the non-monetary payment you have in mind?
The government isn't a monolithic entity. It's composed of people who have often differing interests to each other. The justice system is run by the government, but that didn't stop e.g. the Supreme Court from ordering the bush administration to give process to the Guantanamo prisoners (and the administration complied!)
Taking down the Mexican tech mafia
I would imagine they meant the former. If they wanted to say it was popular they would compare it to Angry Birds.
Yeah that's pretty bad. We need better support for Windows users, including IE.
Maybe the bad drivers are the ones that are picketing, and you're only talking to good drivers? If the good drivers are pleased with the way Uber works, then maybe they're doing something right.
"Of those that do survive, more than half of them have brain damage."

I've read a theory that if as soon as someone as heart attack you put ice on his head you lower the risk of permanent brain damage. If I'm not mistaken there's been a doctor / hospital / ambulances allowing to test this theory in the U.S. (don't remember which one) and they had apparently statistically significant better results when ambulancers did immediately put the head in ice.

Our brain is one heck of a CPU and when the blood doesn't cool it it starts melting fast apparently : (

Lowering temp to 32 deg certainly helped but apparently every second counts: the faster you put the head in ice, the lower the brain damage. So while someone is trying to do CPR, someone else should go fetch lots of ice.

Interesting "feeling lucky to have a great life that I just want to continue to live".

Welcome back!
EL EDO AHI
Very cool. I'll be following this project. It has some very good points so far. Cleaning it up a little will make it that much better.
Why There’s No Mass Protest Over Government Surveillance
I don't know about 100M, but I can definitely see how Mailbox is worth a lot of money to Dropbox.

Dropbox has always been a company that stood on the quality of its product. It doesn't have the most features (that's probably SkyDrive or Google Drive) and it's not the cheapest, but it works insanely well and it works everywhere you want it to. That, and the headstart they had, is what put Dropbox where it is right now.

Mailbox is a quality-first mail app that fits with Dropbox's quality standards, and it allows them to take their first step into the "feature-rich web storage" field without trying to build out an office suit like MS Office or Google Docs that they clearly can't catch up to. This was a chance to buy their way into the mail game, with what some people would consider the best mobile mail app in the business.
I don't care if new features continually creep into Dropbox, so long as the service is kept simple and invisible. The Dropbox service, I suspect, is super-super-super-super-super-super-super-super-super complicated. But Dropbox made file syncing so simple that the software is essentially invisible to the end-user. I believe it is possible for Dropbox to continue adding new feature while keeping their service relatively invisible. The multi-billion dollar question is will they.
Isn't it more effective to simply look at other countries who haven't put such restrictions on their their gun control research?
They are still "enhancing" Blogger. Less than a month ago they introduced a drastic change in the image-upload UI that basically broke it for everyone. It appears to have been meant as an improvement but whoever did it, clearly didn't understand who used it and how. Now they are "looking at" how they can fix it.

So what are the good alternatives to Blogger? And what if you have multiple blogs with hundreds of posts in them? Reader at least is emphemeral, there's no investment of work at risk.