skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The more I hear about Uber, the more it seems to be a tea-party style paranoid right-wing anti big evil government organization instead of a disruptive start-up.

This kind of thing might fly in the US, but in most of Western Europe we take a slightly more nuanced view to the role of government regulation.

Doesn't mean there isn't anything worth disrupting, hell no (somebody please disrupt the Amsterdam taxi market), but in cultures where simply sitting down and figuring out how to remove the obstacles is the custom, hyperbolic scream fests by an American company is not going to work.

Especially not an American company that thinks it's a good idea to conquer Europe with a name like "Uber"...

Both the company name and their PR strategy scream "culturally insensitive American douchebags".
Bitcoin: the Berlin streets where you can shop with virtual money
Linux: start / stop / restart apparmor daemon
As you pointed out, the rapes and assaults are ongoing. By making the bottom of the market illegal (by making it uneconomical), you haven't stopped these crimes from happening, you've simply forced them to occur in the black market where there is even less of a chance to prevent them.

Again, the analogy with drug prohibition is clear. There is an incredible amount of violence occurring, but that isn't a justification for continuing its illegality. To the contrary, its illegal nature is the primary reason the violence occurs, because there is no way to settle disputes in the court system.

Similarly, someone operating a black market taxi cannot call the police when someone refuses to pay. Instead, they must resort to threatening (and engaging in) violence to get payment. The customers may engage in violence against these underground drivers for the same reason. Making it illegal serves nobody, and only increases danger for all parties.
Oh I don't look at usernames on purpose - I want to avoid falling into the traps of 'upvote/downvote because I usually like/dislike this guy's answers' and 'I have a mental image of such and of this guy because of previous posts, therefore this post must be correct/wrong too'.

Anyway I did read your post (and I'd argue, I read that reasonably) as saying 'debt = bad'. So if you're not saying that and only meant this particular investment, then I guess we're resolved our differences.
God says...

20:15 Cursed be the man who brought tidings to my father, saying, A
man child is born unto thee; making him very glad.

20:16 And let that man be as the cities which the LORD overthrew, and
repented not: and let him hear the cry in the morning, and the
shouting at noontide; 20:17 Because he slew me not from the womb; or
that my mother might have been my grave, and her womb to be always
great with me.

20:18 Wherefore came I forth out of the womb to see labour and sorrow,
that my days should be consumed with shame? 21:1 The word which came
unto Jeremiah from the LORD, when king Zedekiah sent unto him Pashur
the son of Melchiah, and Zephaniah the son of Maaseiah the priest,
saying, 21:2 Enquire, I pray thee, of the LORD for us; for
Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon maketh war against us; if so be that
the LORD will deal with us according to all his wondrous works, that
he may go up from us.

----

If churchhill wished oil had never been born.
I think that anyone not in a law firm or financial services would find it hard to remember those days.

An acquaintance, probably 70 by now, worked in IBM sales when he was first out of the Navy. He said that a fellow salesman shocked the office by coming to work in a blue rather than white shirt. (He didn't mention any deaths from the shock, so I assume the guy still had suit and tie.) And Gerald Weinberg has written of a slightly earlier period that at IBM you demonstrated that you were a genius by growing a beard and not getting fired.

I did once work for a place where men where expected to wear ties when going to customer sites. (You might also have squeeze in behind a refrigerator-sized minicomputers.) My boss grumbled a bit when one of our better techs skipped the tie on the grounds of limited range of motion, having recently had shoulder surgery. But there were no consequences.

Oh, and from the truly distant past: I worked with a man whose father-in-law had worked at FBI headquarters. The older man told of J. Edgar Hoover one day stopping in the hall, looking over at an agent in an unusually-colored suit (I think green) and say "That's an odd-colored suit for an agent to wear.) The guy was gone from headquarters the next day, I suppose shipped to Butte, Montana.
Just based on this blog post it appears to have done well. He (?) starts off discussing that people seem to have believed and rallied around the Uber story without applying any critical thinking. So I'm guessing it did resonate.
Pretty interesting, I've messed around with aggregating stats on players, matchups, etc for my own fantasy teams and always wondered why someone didn't go and build a product around it.

Excited to see what you guys will be providing!
The genre jumping games that defied critics
Sure, just like December is the tenth month of the year.
It's good and useful for independent researchers to collect their own data and analyse it. That's a check on the data collection methods.

It's also useful for others to check the analysis of trusted data. If they do it with their own methods and get a different result, then it's time to actually compare the methods.

It's a good thing for the original researchers to release their code too. But looking for bugs in the code is no substitute for doing independent analysis and independent data collection. It's an important supplement, but it isn't enough.
Hackernews, security.stackexchange.com, the Dutch security.nl and Google+.

Also Reddit and Twitter now and then (I don't follow a while lot of people, so I can read back the whole week in a matter of minutes).

Once a month or so I read xkcd.com and exocomics.com, usually when I'm utterly bored or in a bad mood.
Which is why you find yourself here?
FUD. What different business model? It's fairly similar to what's already being offered by other companies (nice cars, phone app, good service) and all they have to do to comply is a price sticker and a meter.
Congrats to Parse folks!
Crush some coal, mix it with warm water, drop it 7000 feet into the ground, extract up-flowing crude.

http://www.hcssllc.com/
The rent in Melbourne and Sydney is pretty insane also... we have the very same problem. This is why a few people bootstrap from SouthEastAsia : low_rent == longer_runway :]
The certified tamper-proof meter... and the sticker in the window. You're using an app to arrange transport. All of the information you need is there.
We already are able to create artificial oil by ourself.[1] And the chemical formula is even better than turning lead into gold because it is turning CO2 into high quality oil!

It is fun to see how this is not talk in the media...

[1] http://www.biopetroleo.com/english/
Overreaction.

I'd take the drink over the junk an average American eats any day. I'd take it over my own well researched eating regime every other day if it seemed to be working for me.

You underestimate the power of self experimentation. With a drug which if you took 40x the daily dose you might die, or a drug that might cause significant harmful side effects at normal dose, you need careful studies to prove a benefit and quantify risks. With a dietary change, the risks are orders of magnitude lower. I'd be surprised if the average American wouldn't improve their nutritional status doing this for a while, with an existing diet likely low in magnesium, copper, zinc, vitamin c and d and probably more.
You don't really read this every day, do you? If so, how much time do you spend on it per day?
The article seems to actually talk about it being "Hardware Hacker Heaven."

That is something I definitely believe, although I would then be interested more in a practical guide to / report on on how to pull off actually building something there.
Dynamic pricing is a different business model -- it's kind of incompatible with a sticker.
> and the biological light making process is probably not as efficient as an LED

Interestingly enough, the luciferase reaction is actually more efficient than LED.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luciferase#Mechanism_of_reacti...
If the price is the same, then that indicates that there is a shortage of supply and the unlicensed cabs are filling that demand. In that case, the choice for many people isn't between licensed and unlicensed cabs, but rather between unlicensed cabs and no cabs at all.

Cracking down on these unlicensed cabs won't hurt the wealthy as much, who naturally have more choices for transportation, but it could absolutely hurt poorer people who have don't have as many alternatives.
"natural rights" are of course nonsensical without resort to the supernatural. The founders are Christians and diests, for the most part, so natural law fits within that framework. It has no relevence in a post-religion world.
Right to Share: Principles on Freedom of Expression and Copyright in Digital Age
When you "observe this account and search for anything we can use to get a subpoena", have you not made yourself an agent of the government? You are now looking at client information on request of the government. I'd think that triggers the "unreasonable search and seizure" and could (I hope) result in a mistrial.
Agree. I wouldn't treat it as a rule. Normally it's the right thing to start with solving user problem, but I see many successful businesses built on trying to find application to the "new cool stuff". Github is one more example of the company driven by technology choice first.
What if we never run out of oil? What if there is no global warming? What if nuclear power plants never exploded?

I guess we are officially in denial now.

Jokes aside though, higher prices for fossil fuels are a reality and regardless of the size of future reserves, we do have to deal with that at least. The same goes for global warming. Regardless of whether we are the cause of it or not, we have to deal with the consequences. The same goes for nuclear energy. Regardless of whether more modern reactors are safe or not, neither Chernobyl nor Fukushima are solved problems and they won't get solved for another few thousand years.

Hence, my take is that we need to progress to a culture of perpetual sustainability and independence of as many external variables as possible.
And that's why we use chips instead of magnetic strips nowadays.

For a longer list, see: https://krebsonsecurity.com/all-about-skimmers/

The one with the keylogger-featuring keypad is what has me most worried, someone could rob me of my card a bit later. Then again, they might as well rob my card and demand the code, having someone else try it while keeping me at gunpoint. Yeah guns are outlawed here, but that doesn't mean they don't have 'em.

Crypto is cool, until you mention physical security. Obligatory: http://xkcd.com/538/
As you pointed out, the rapes and assaults are ongoing. By making the bottom of the market illegal (by making it uneconomical), you haven't stopped these crimes from happening, you've simply forced them to occur in the black market where there is even less of a chance to prevent them.

Except the numbers are now smaller, less people are put at risk and less people see that risk realised. It demonstrably has made the situation better, not worse.

Again, the analogy with drug prohibition is clear. There is an incredible amount of violence occurring, but that isn't a justification for continuing its illegality. To the contrary, its illegal nature is the primary reason the violence occurs

Except that turns out not to be anything like what happened with cabs when the violence was worse when the illegality was not present. So no, it's not a good analogy and it doesn't work.

Similarly, someone operating a black market taxi cannot call the police when someone refuses to pay. Instead, they must resort to threatening (and engaging in) violence to get payment.

This is their lookout for running an illegal service.

The customers may engage in violence against these underground drivers for the same reason. Making it illegal serves nobody, and only increases danger for all parties.

Except it has actually reduced the danger.

Look, you can argue the prohibition line all you like but it doesn't match what has actually happened out in the real world.
Most of the anti-nuclear prejudice in the US comes from known design flaws in plants that are over 30 years old that were built before people knew what they were doing. Modern, passive-safety nuclear plants just don't have those TMI/Fukushima/Chernobyl risks.

I wonder if they said similar things 30 years ago, too.
> It doesn't get better when they start spouting complete lies - the gibberish about certain unmarked taxi-like services being exclusive to "royal families or prominent business leaders". Not related to reality at all.

I was wondering about that too, but instead of declaring Uber to be lying here on HN, I went and looked for more information. What I found, was a news article that actually went and asked the Swedish Transport Agency for a comment[1].

STA's answer was that STA has had no direct contact with Uber, but had had contact with two companies that drive cars for Uber. Those two companies had asked for an exception from having an taximeter in the car (Swedish law requires one otherwise). STA denied the request, stating that to get an exception, one needs to follow the regulations of 1998, which states that exceptions are only allowed in exceptional cases, for instance when driving for royal families or prominent business leaders.

So, Uber is ... stretching the truth. Their claim is not a complete fabrication, but neither did they tell the whole story. I tend to put cases like this under the "company statement" category.

[1]: http://feber.se/webb/art/270558/transportstyrelsen_vill_kick...
clean, elegant, and attractive

I notice that these are not in contradiction with adjectives that come to my mind first.. such as sterile, pretentious, mediocre, repetetive, heartless. Though now I think I'm kinda projecting properties into "flat design" it might not have, based on the properties I see becoming real hip in people.
The marketing department markets the phones, it does not design the UI.
Rediscovering a cloud: OS-less instances, ephemeral services, no sysadmins
> I'm really surprised by people who act like this is some kind of new or novel idea. Meal replacements have been around for a very, very long time. There are some really common ones you can buy at any grocery store, such as Ensure.

I read something yesterday that summed this up pretty much perfectly.

If there's more than one of something, it means that it wasn't done right the first time. See: Cars, Computers, Telephones, Light Bulbs, etc...
I've never understood this "don't obsess about performance at the start" rule.

Is it really that much of a problem spending a few extra hours prototyping different solutions and factoring in performance from the start. Why wouldn't I pick Vertx over Play if it 2-3x faster with similar productivity. That's money not spend on VPSs that can be used for marketing.

Likewise why wouldn't I look at a binary serialization format if it means my iPhone app starts up 5 seconds quicker. Users decide whether or not your app is worth keeping in those few seconds of starting the app. Why not spend time trying to keep them ?

Or as great as PostgreSQL is for single server deployment why wouldn't I look at something easier to manage, trivial to scale and a more agile schema like a DynamoDB, MongoHQ, Cassandra. Especially if I am a single person startup.

I understand about premature optimisation but it seems to make a lot more sense to properly consider your architecture from the start rather than deferring it. Or did we all forget Digg v4 ?
Cph?
>all groceries are mandated to list price per weight/volume/appropriate other unit so you can find out, say, which bag of rice is cheapest per kg, for instance - the same goes for taxi services and price per km

That's actually really interesting and I had no idea that was the case. In a supermarket, would such a list be in the isle next to the food? Or would it just be available from management or something like that?
Innovative, in this context, means they are doing things in a way that was not previously done. IE, you use you mobile phone to order the taxi or pay. The current system is built around (presumably) people calling or waving & paying with cash or CC.
http://hubski.com

http://popurls.com

http://www.brainpickings.org/

http://kottke.org
Post Mortem: Recent Build Infrastructure Issues
Nope, no Wine dependency, just Mono. The Linux package is very young so it has some bugs still, I'm still figuring it out.

EDIT: Missing (unlisted in the .deb metadata for now) dependencies include:
- libmono-system-windows-forms4.0-cil
- libmono-system-core4.0-cil
- libSDL-mixer1.2debian

I'll update the package ASAP.
There are many alternatives in London, getting a cab is a luxury. Tubes run frequently during most of the day, busses run all night.
My pleasure, glad to hear that. Send a screenshot my way at @elisee sometimes? :)
Wow, thank you big time, much appreciated! :)
The opening paragraphs about Churchill are fascinating
Why do you assume they didn't know the local laws?
> Taking the top 5% of every ethnic group is the same as taking 5% of the entire applicant population

Except you get an entirely different applicant pool; if the numbers from the article are accurate, the former gives you far fewer Asians and Whites and far more African Americans and Hispanics than the latter.
My own immediate reaction upon first reading the Rust tutorial was that significant semicolons were completely brain-dead. However, time went on and I was never able to think of a scenario where the compiler wouldn't immediately detect an errant or missing semicolon. Nowadays I completely adore them (though I still recommend that people use an explicit `return` in any expression of nontrivial length).
Blink, A New App For Ephemeral Text And Photo Messaging, Arrives On iPhone
Out of curiosity, are there any particular reasons why you like Clojure more than other Lisps/Schemes? I've played with it a little and found it kind of weird due to no car/cdr/cons, no TCO, loop/recur/trampoline, the usage of [], and various other quirks. It's a Lisp but you can't just write Lisp code in it, it requires learning new idioms. But I'm not good enough at Clojure yet to know what advantages it has over other Lisp family languages, aside from the Java libraries. What features of Clojure do you particularly like?
I'm a Swede living in Stockholm and I have never ever heard of this company. I stopped reading right after this painful sentence:

The STA’s explanation for this is that the permit that is required should only be given to companies that drive members of royal families or prominent business leaders.
You are most likely right. I have never been involved in any business that targets the consumer market, so I have little first hand knowledge, but I once had the misfortune to be involved in a project to design software to aid the government procurement process.
There's a huge amount of laws there, which makes it darn near impossible to submit a tender, much less design a valid request for tenders. These laws are there to combat corruption (the point is that it should be virtually impossible to, as a government employee, simply award a government project to your brother in law if he really doesn't provide the best offer), but the amount of red tape involved turned out to be staggering. According to our expert source on the laws involved, it was in fact impossible to not break the law, as there were parts of it that were conflicting with itself.

That said - sorry for going on an off topic tangent - I think that over all the consumer protection laws have public support, and the possible downsides they come with w/r to establishing new actors in a market are outweighed by the benefits they have to consumer. But nothing is without its cost, you say.
To be fair on that, nuclear (even using those creaky, old designs) still has a better safety record per kilowatt-hour than fossil fuels.
Whether or not it is a luxury, the existence of unlicensed cabs is proof of unmet demand. They indicate either that licensed cabs are too expensive, or that they aren't in high enough supply.
Not Sweden, but the UK (and Germany) have the same thing.

Usually, they just tell you on the shelf's price tag:

Bigger Font: 1.50€/£
Smaller Font: 0.75€/p per 100g/100ml etc.

That way, you can see that sometimes it makes sense to buy 2x 400ml ketchup (just as an example where I had it recently) instead of 1x 800ml, simply because 2x 400ml is actually cheaper.
LightArrow’s New Calendar App Lets Users Start Simple and Power Up As They Go
All products need to have a clearly visible pricetag next to/on the product. So for food the information is on that pricetag next to the item.
Except for trousers, which eventually get a hole in the crotch. Fucking trousers...

A thousand thanks for posting this. I thought I had some physical deformity because my last two (very-often-worn) jeans wore through in the crotch in less than a year. (Of course that made other aspects of my life more convenient).

Good to know I'm not the only one.
I disagree. Google is probably the biggest threat to Apple, and Apple is probably the biggest threat to Android, but not to Google. Apple has essentially no web presence, companies that do are a much bigger existential threat to Google.
TUAW: Quicklytics is the Analytics client that Google should have made
>"better off" == "has more money"

Just to be extra clear, this isn't a value judgement, it's literally a linguistic equation. "better off" is a british euphemism employed to avoid gauche phrases like "earns more than."
Absolutely love the colours that are associated with flat design. I think, we as designers are defining a new set of rules for what we want flat design to be. The applications in the context of mobile sites is obvious where space is limited. As always, once you've learned the rules you then have the ability to break them.
Ah yes, the rubber-hose cryptanalysis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber-hose_cryptanalysis
The other complication is that Instapaper is in a weird place in its lifecycle. It's got lots of paid users, but they paid years ago, and now they are just a drag on making any kind of meaningful changes. Investing a lot of money to improve the app probably wouldn't pay off.
I was with you up until the nuclear part.

I don't know about the US, but most resistance in Europe is not "prejudice" about plant safety, but educated concerns about waste and waste-storage safety.

As long as the pro-nuclear crowd circumvents addressing those concerns but tries to make the other side look like dumb scared peasants, I'll be on the anti-nuclear side.

For one reason and one reason only: I may not be able to judge how safe modern nuclear energy is, but I'm damn well able to perceive which side is being the most dishonest. If I can't trust people to have an honest debate, I'm definitely not trusting these same people with nuclear plants, however safe it may be possible to do in theory.
It would normally be right next to the price of the item itself on the shelf (usu. in smaller font). Here are some examples I found via google images. [1] is an example of a tesco shelf label. [2] is an example of why having this extra info available is useful for consumers (and some of the bizzare tricks that consumers still fall for)

Here

[1] http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-i80uxvW1SnA/Tp3zocKih4I/AAAAAAAAAJ...

[2] http://www.freshfrom77.com/wp-content/uploads/tesco-multi-bu...