skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Two-factor or not two-factor? That is the security question
Five Steps to Creating Your Ideal Digital Learning Plan
A few people have mentioned Reddits, and some of them really are great. For those who use RSS, you can subscribe to your front page. https://ssl.reddit.com/prefs/feeds/

Similarly, if you want a feed of some specific subreddits, you can use something like reddit.com/r/programming+entrepeneur/.rss
> English conventions are inconsistent.

Yes, and it's an argument for expressing these ideas with mathematics instead of words.

> Therefore it's better to state it in an unambiguous way, e.g. X took 2x as much time as Y, or just look at the numbers directly.

Complete agreement.
Intro text: part of the header or body?
> The reason popularity matters, even though I have the technical skill to administer any OS competently, is that popularity is the single best incentive to encourage third parties to iron out the kinks on a particular platform.

I prefer a working platform that forces me to read the manual beforehand over a platform where I don’t have to read the manual but random third parties iron out kinks.

Popularity is a measure of quality, but only of quality wrt to the usecases of the people among which the product is popular. My computer usage is very different from my mum’s, and likely from 95% of the population, hence, the popularity of a product among 95% of the population is rather irrelevant to me.

If you’re a single person with a tight budget looking for a car, you don’t look at car popularity among large families owning oil fields, but among people similar (in the relevant ways) to yourself.

Hence, popularity among a large user base is an indicator that the OS is optimised for use by a large part of the population. If you find that this is indicative of the quality you’re looking for, fine.
this approach has worked well for uber in the usa. wonder if they've made a mistake by assuming that anti-govt sentiment in other countries is similar? or by simply copying the technique without thinking?

but this is from a single english-language post. what is the rest of the local reaction like? [ah, see reply below - i missed "response was huge" (in the sense of support for uber)]
Same for Portuguese.
True. Nobody can check if your data + your methodology = the results you claim.

But it is quite common for someone to take the same problem, collect their own data and run their own analysis (both steps can be completely different from the original statement-- collecting data of a different type, from a different instrument, etc. Running an analysis of a different paradigm, running the same analysis to a different precision, running the same analysis via a different algorithm, etc.).

If you read the arxiv on a daily basis you can see huge academic arguments unfolding over the course of months and years.

There seems to be this idea that the conversation goes: "Yo I found this hypervelocity star" "Dope, let's move on"

It's actually more like: "Yo I found this hypervelocity star" "Nope, I got spectra and you're wrong" "Well I got ultra high-res spectra and I think he's right" "Actually all of you are forgetting asymmetric drift, this is just a geometry problem, l2angles" "Hey, I sit in my basement and play with MOND, it might help" "My simulations show something completely different"

Authors are called out and proven right or wrong on a daily basis, even if we can't watch them code over the shoulder. I actually think that's one of the beauties of it-- most of our methods are invented by trying to prove or disprove something in a new way.

The monster codes like GADGET (which ran the millenium sim everyone's seen) are usually made public after ~5 years of proprietariness.
That's an extremely inefficient and costly way to validate a result! It would be rendered unnecessary in cases where just looking at the code invalidated the result.

I'm in academia (see my profile for details).
Microsoft prevails in Xbox patent rift with Motorola Mobility
I get as much value from the comments as the stories themselves so:

- HN (still the king for quality of comments as well as generally interesting links)

- Reddit (some sub-reddits are very interesting, especially domain specific ones)

- Stackoverflow sites (some great info here, but their rather draconian rules on questions that require opinions can cause frustrations as many answers do require some sort of opinion. It is quite amazing how often I get value from questions that have been closed as not constructive.)

- BoingBoing.net (used to be a regular but has become too weird for my tastes)
Isn't this a demand-supply problem? People tend to make profit (legal or illegal) by increasing selling price when demand is high. This might suck for buyers who can't afford it. But, that is pure economics.

Would you change the supply side of the equation or would you tinker with the transaction to fix this?
I find it odd that Uber is constantly fighting various countries' laws to be considered "a taxi service, but not a taxi service", when they could just change their business model a tiny bit and fall straight into the middle of the "limousine service" classification.

Why not charge just-time instead of time+distance? Would it screw over the drivers?
TFA notes

> The response was pretty huge. What surprised me was that people who are bright and often critical of sources jumped on the wagon without asking obvious questions:

Since the original Uber post was in swedish and targeted at swedes, I expect it was local reaction.
I had the same issue, even with the same config file, with no pagespeed directive, the version with the pagespeed module failed for static files for me.

[0426/064031:INFO:google_message_handler.cc(33)] Shutting down ngx_pagespeed root
Friday Freak Out – Stop The Desperation to Blog About Facebook
It's sad that the State Department had this brilliant strategist on their payroll, but left him doing IT rather than tapping his skills as a diplomat.
OK, you've confused me. You say:

I am pretty sure I can flag this

So, you think you can flag this ...

(not enough karma?), but someone should ...

But this implies that you can not flag this.

Have you simply mis-typed yourself, or is that what you really meant to type?
Would be nice to add support for not-inlined templates with high-performance template engine like CTPP2 (ngx_ctpp2)
I was on Uber's side for a long time initially. But with what's have been going on in the past few months, I am more than willing to believe the author. Especially after that protest by some drivers, outside their office in SF. "It was only a handful of drivers", you might argue. But the fact that none of the company officials came down to listen to them, just points out their "we don't give a fuck" attitude. And it is this arrogance, that brings down corporates and even empires.
The mistake was not researching local laws before entering a new market. It has nothing to do with anti-govt sentiment.
Some quotes from the article:

"The market is unregulated, meaning that you can set any price for your services."

"You can safely say that there’s healthy competition on the market."

"You do need a permit to have a taxi service."

"The fact is that Uber are asking for an exemption to be able to compete on unfair grounds"

Notice some contradictions here?

Author claims that market is unregulated and competition is fair, but then admits there is regulation and legal requirements (that cost real money). If you want to make a nice private taxi service with 2x lower prices, you cannot because you have to pay local government for all licenses and whatever taximeter they provide you, not the one you design for your own company and your customers' safety.

When talking about "unfair advantage", author makes presupposition that existing regulations and licensing are "fair". Well, that needs to be proven. Saying "somebody voted for it in a democracy" is not a proof, sorry. Try that with a scientific study: "scientists voted that P != NP with 58% majority".
ProgrammableWeb Gets Acquired, Again, This Time By MuleSoft
Nine tenths as much to be correct. From wiki: The word decimation is derived from Latin meaning "removal of a tenth". A cohort selected for punishment by decimation was divided into groups of ten; each group drew lots (Sortition), and the soldier on whom the lot fell was executed by his nine comrades.
Hacked.IO - learning, building and sharing cool stuff
Reading into Alcatel-Lucent’s ProgrammableWeb Decision
Scientists detect dark lightning linked to visible lightning
> For me, as an "experimentalist" (read, data-analyst), I also maintain job attractiveness by having sets of code that no one else has. I'm experienced in a variety of pattern finding algorithms, and have even invented a few myself for very specific problems-- and within my little sphere, people know this about me, I'm the person people come to for certain things.
> I spent years of my life perfecting these, learning about algorithms, learning the intricacies and quirks of the various datasets we use-- if someone wants to take my place in this community as "that guy" then I expect them to devote as much time as I have to learning these techniques inside out and then to do something better than me.
> I have no desire to pass my code off to a masters student and let him naively plug some dataset into it-- firstly because no one should ever rely on a black box in this field, and secondly because these codes all need to be tweaked to account for the different instruments and data structures being used.

> Perhaps if my contract didn't have a built in expiration I would be willing to care-bear-share my fractal search methods and spend my Thursday afternoons showing you how to Savitsky-Golay smoothing works, but as long as I'm out of a job next July, and you're the guy applying for my job, you can keep your filthy hands off my code.

First, WOW. In can't imagine any sector (except indeed academia) where a "keep your filthy hands off my code" attitude like that is remotely acceptable.

Second question is, whose code, exactly? In most lines of work, if you write code for an employer (university in this case, I suppose), the copyright for that code is implicitly given to the employer. In this particular case, it means they could, as well as should force you to open this code. It could very well be that your contract explicitly states different, it has to be clear about code though, it's not just implied together with writings, for instance.

Imagine if you were to work for, say, a security analysis consultancy firm, and you write a lot of cool machine learning and analysis code to detect intrusions or leakage. Regardless of whether your contract expires, if you leave, you're not leaving with your code. And if you'd refuse to document it properly so that the next guy can't use it, expect the contract to expire prematurely.

I can imagine that would seem frustrating and scary NOW, but only because they made it seem like yours was a proper approach for all those years you gave it. Of course it wasn't--and deep down inside you know this to be true--if only everything had been open from the start.
Top 5 Reasons Why China Is Hacker Heaven
>whatever taximeter they provide you

The author mentions that Uber could have tried to get their App approved as a taximeter, but they did not even try.

> Author claims that market is unregulated and competition is fair, but then admits there is regulation

Getting a license is not a "regulation". What the author means is, that the prices are not regulated and the taxis are free to charge whatever they want. So Uber can offer their service at any price, without being forced to a minimum or a maximum.
I don't understand it. Why the constant drama around their every (lack of) license? Can't they just obtain ones just like the rest of driver services or do the authorities owe them something?
ROP (Return On Project), the humble beginning… [0/7]
> you cannot because you have to pay local government for all licenses and whatever taximeter they provide you, not the one you design for your own company and your customers' safety.

The reason you can't provide a service with 2x lower prices is that you would make a huge loss doing that, and it has nothing to do with regulations.

You are allowed to design your own taximeters btw.

And the regulation is "fair" in the sense that it applies equally to all companies (note that Uber is trying to get exepmtion from a rule that their competitors comply with).
Users of apps based on Parse used to just be users, now they're Facebook users. Combine the fact that a core part of Parse is storing user data, and Facebook's track record of treating such data, I think you should be able to figure the rest out yourself.

If I'm going to pay a firm to store data for me, I need to completely trust that that firm is going to treat said data with silk gloves. I choose what's done with it, not my backend storage partner.

I'm going to be very surprised if the Facebook make-a-detailed-profile-of-every-person-on-the-planet department is going to keep their hands off of Parse data for the next 3 years.
The market is unregulated in that each driver is free to set their price, as compared to other places where there is a fixed, state-mandated price per kilometer.

The fact that you need a permit does not constitute regulation in any sensible sense (unless you call everything regulation), since you need a permit for basically everything.

The fact that you need a certified taximeter is customer protection – given that Uber charges per kilometer and time unit, I don’t see why they oppose a certified taximeter.

Similarly, you cannot make a nice private business selling X, because you have to pay income tax and VAT.
Exactly, they have to obey the law of the land. If the limousines in Sweden are supposed to charge by time, then do that. Change your app to charge by time in that particular country.
Fair says nothing about reasonable just applying the same rules to everyone. Forcing a school bake sale to collect sales taxes is "Fair" because it's the same rules a bakery operates under.
The Story of the Rainbow Ghost, fairytale for kids, today (26.4.2013) for free
Show HN: My tool to divide up tasks so everyone does less work
So what exactly is their model?

I found it hard to figure out from their website how they differ from any other taxi service with online ordering and payment.

Also, if there are rules in Sweden about meters and price displays, there's probably a consumer-focussed reason for them.
I have to put in documentation and a good explanation. But I just wanted to see if any managers thought the tool might be useful.

The problem it is trying to solve is to minimise the amount of work people think they are doing by allocating jobs to people who want them most.

All the jobs would be 100% of the work. Each employee puts in what % of the total each job would be for them. The system optimizes so that each employee has the same perceived effort and that perceived effort is minimized.
There are some obvious UX fixes that need to be made but I would be interested to hear what you think of the problem/solution idea?
I don't know about Stockholm, but in US and France taxi drivers must buy a taxi license for many thousands of dollars/euros that effectively allows them be a part of a monopoly. The price for the license is market-defined because there is a limited number of licenses and few restrictions on trading them. But the interesting point is that licenses were initially created many years ago by some taxi mafia and lobbied to be enforced by police.

Now, put aside "fairness" issues, just imagine if someone comes up with Uber or similar service to work around these licensing requirements. And at the same time provides superior service. They will be able to ask lower prices, which will endanger every taxi driver who's invested already to be a part of a monopoly.

Now imagine that something like Uber moves to bitcoins and become almost anonymous. You won't be able to shutdown the central organisation - it's outside the country and has no bank account. You'll have to fight with individual "illegal" taxi drivers that use the system. But how would you prove that they get paid? There are no credit cards or cash. The person who gets in the car only tells the driver a short pin code to authenticate himself. Or says nothing at all. The driver just gives a friendly lift.

Suddenly no one needs taxis and every taxi driver has lost tens of thousands of dollars invested in his license and can do nothing about it. Customers win, other drivers win, mafia loses. Is it fair? Is in unfair? If you cannot avoid this outcome, does it really matter?
> It's actually more like: "Yo I found this hypervelocity star" "Nope, I got spectra and you're wrong" "Well I got ultra high-res spectra and I think he's right" "Actually all of you are forgetting asymmetric drift, this is just a geometry problem, l2angles" "Hey, I sit in my basement and play with MOND, it might help" "My simulations show something completely different"

Haha, that actually sounds almost exactly like the Stone Soup parable :)

( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_soup )
Livences often cost a lot of money. Enough that buying one can easily make there model unprofitable in many areas.

Ex: In NYC there worth 750,000+ USD at 4% thasts 30,000 dollars plus added per taxi every year.
BYOB - Best of all worlds
Maybe they saw the manufactured outrage as a good PR opportunity.

That only lasts so long, until people get tired of it and start looking into the details, of course.
> Sony is building its CPU on what it's calling an extended DirectX 11.1+ feature set, including extra debugging support that is not available on PC platforms. This system will also give developers more direct access to the shader pipeline than they had on the PS3 or through DirectX itself. "This is access you're not used to getting on the PC, and as a result you can do a lot more cool things and have a lot more access to the power of the system," Norden said. A low-level API will also let coders talk directly with the hardware in a way that's "much lower-level than DirectX and OpenGL," but still not quite at the driver level.

source: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/03/sony-dives-deep-into-t...

edit: that said, I wouldn't be surprised if there was an OpenGL stack available for ps4, especially if they want to attract indie-devs.
Notice some contradictions here?

Only ones that are only visible to hardcore libertarians.
Yahoo Inc Chairman Fred Amoroso is resigning effective immediately, the struggling Internet company announced on Thursday.

Amoroso said he had informed the Yahoo board when he became chairman in May 2012 that he intended to serve only one year

This is either shoddy journalism, sensationalist lede, or both. There's clearly more here but I guess the writer said, "Meh - this is good enough. I'll just post this" instead of researching deeper and finding out "Was the resignation planned far in advance or was this a shock to the Yahoo! folks?"
Completely unregulated and unregistered cab services have a history of very bad things happening in them in the UK.

Customers do not win, customers get assaulted and raped.
"Regulation and legal requirements" are for running the taxi service. "Market is unregulated" is for the fares that can be charged by a taxi service.

If "existing regulations and licensing" are unfair, better rope in every one and ask for changing those regulations; asking for exemption from the rules that everyone else has to comply with is not fair either.
Looked at it, amazing.

Great job, perhaps you're project will get me into game-creation ;-)

Good luck anyhow!
No they didn't. Where?
Red Hat Openshift has been pretty solid for us for over a year and is incredible easy to use.
Yeah, it sucks. Fairly typical workforce neglect really. Assuming that he'd have been up for it - maybe he just enjoyed his job.
Long story short is that Facebook needed a way to be a platform for other mobile app companies' products without building a new os.

Developer mindshare is a big deal for technology companies. It has been argued that Microsoft's dominance in the 90s was fueled by its ownership of the windows api. Because the windows api had the most users, Microsoft owned the main platform where software developers and consumers would meet. While there was often friction between MS and the rest of the software community, they had a beneficial relationship.

Microsoft got paid rent and could leverage other people's work in making their value proposition to customers (ie if you want to game seriously you'll need to run Windows). And all of those developers did not have to write their own operating system or deal with all of the different computer companies.

Because Facebook apps have turned out to be more attractive as a way to access their social media users (ie for dating services etc) than it is for general purpose software products, they need a new way to grab developer mindshare.

Amazon didn't care about making their own mobile operating system because they have AWS. That's why they just forked android. Facebook doesn't want to buy a whole new mobile operating system in 2013 because blackberry and windows phone have shown how expensive it is to try and convince customers that they are a viable competitor to android and iPhone.

Being a mobile backend as a service allows Facebook to take rents and work with developers and avoid that big marketing effort. On the other hand, they will take on similar risks to Netflix. They need to prove themselves to be as valuable to android and iPhone as Netflix is to Verizon and Comcast or they will get jerked around.
Try giving the ‘decent’ answer to the thousandth person asking that very question without any sign whatsoever of the work they put in. Or to the person who obviously did not read the rules for the mailing list they signed up to and instead ‘just asks a simple question’. There are, unfortunately, many more entitled people than you think.

Fortunately, you can easily killfile people in mailing lists, and doing so quickly (i.e. after one wrong post) helped me greatly.
"do the same as the competition but illegally so it's cheaper" as a business model is just begging for trouble.

around here we have discount taxi-but-not-a-taxi who manage to skip the regulations, yeah, they're cheap, but it's not like they don't generate a lot of controversies. and it's not like one of them after 30hrs of driving without sleep didn't crash into my gf's car on the parking lot and fainted. transport regulations have their faults, but they are invented for a reason.
How to use social proof to get ahead in the blogosphere
> First, WOW. In can't imagine any sector (except indeed academia) where a "keep your filthy hands off my code" attitude like that is remotely acceptable.

Actually, keeping code "close to your chest" is pretty common in the security industry. You'll see fuzzer frameworks get released all the time, but fuzzers which find "real bugs worth money" tend to get hoarded.

If you work for a consultancy and have private tools, you are not expected to hand those over to the company. They will appreciate it if you release some results with their name on it (as well as yours) every now and then though.
> That he worked at a company whose standard practice was to have developers run code in development against the production database?

His point is probably that professionals don't do that. It's not the companies fault he was working directly on the production database.
> Why the constant drama around their every (lack of) license?

I don't know about Sweden, but here in Germany licenses are limited, i.e. there is no infinite amount of taxi license per city.
I've heard from my San Francisco friends that Uber is superior in every way to yellow taxis. And main reason is that it's very easy to rate drivers and you don't pay them directly.