skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just spent a year in Aquitane on the right bank of the Gironde (where Bordeaux wines come from) and can confirm that quality in wine is in fact bullshit. (not wine, but the idea of quality in wine)

Just looking at the difference between left and right bank prices and a complete lack if difference in quality is telling.

Also that the 5 first growth producers are rated as such for historical reasons and no-one gets into the exclusive club - and yet Premier Cru is used as an indication of quality in wine.

Quality in wine was real back when the idea of hygiene in producing wine and the knowledge of wine making was not shared and access to labs was limited. No longer and so unless you're screwing up a well known process, you're going to get it pretty darn right.

So wine quality is bullshit, but is wine bullshit? I don't think so. Lets put it this way: If you fly first-class, there's something a little more than the bigger seats and better food that you enjoy. It's the idea of flying first class.

And so while a bottle from most decent chateaux on the right bank may be of equal quality to the left bank (left bank is where all the major chateaux are based) and yet much cheaper, you're still going to really enjoy the idea that you're drinking a bottle of 1990 Margaux as several connoisseurs jealously watch your every sip and explain how you're drinking one of the best vintages of one of the 5 best chateaux in the world.
Very good point.

The studies that conclude that tasters are no good at differentiating wine seem to presuppose that price is a good indication of quality to begin with, and when an expert picks a cheaper wine over a more expensive one they fail to consider the possibility that the problem is with that assumption rather than the expert's tasting ability.

Edit: TFA (which I didn't R :) makes the point that there seems to be little correlation between price/qual. But it's worth emphasising this point anyway, I think.
It tastes good. Some tastes better than others. Lots of people agree in general terms about this.

No need to analyze it or suspect a conspiracy. Move along.
i'm pretty sure it's grapes
I call bullshit. There are some red wines that can work where you'd normally go for a white, such as Pinot Noir. I'm willing to accept someone can mistake a full bodied white for a thin Pinot Noir if food coloring was involved. Mistaking a thick red Sicilian wine for a bone dry Chablis? Not going to happen. Unless you're running into the effect where test subjects are trying to please the researchers and they're ignoring the fact that the "red" wine tastes somewhat unusual.
How is using resources to do something improper (targeting groups) a consequence of not having enough resources to do other more proper things?

Edit: OK, gotcha.
This is where we really need fully homomorphic encryption!
Yes.

So is beer, whiskey, fashion, electronic gadgets, and lots of other things. But our perception being altered is part of the experience, and if you need to know that it cost a bit more to do it then good for you and if you get your kicks knowing that it cost just a few dollars then thats fine too.
Ouya launches for $99; already sold out on Amazon, GameStop
The 3 Skillsets that Make Successful Product Managers | Kenton Kivestu
I know that here in Toronto there are additional restrictions on what cabbies can and cannot do (they must take the most direct route to your destination, are restricted from offering unsolicited hotel and restaurant recommendations, &c) [1]. Not that these sorts of protections are universally enforced (nor is this an excuse for many of the absurdities of licensing), but to pretend that licensing is entirely without benefit is being disingenuous.

[1] http://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2013/ls/bgrd/backgroundfi...
Extrapolate this, am I not allowed to accept gas money from a friend if I drive them around?

Of course I wouldn't be fined for that, but where is the line drawn? Do I have to know a person very well before I can accept their money for a ride? A friend of a friend? Will I be asked to answer a series of questions about the person if I am pulled over?
The first one is off-topic, but it could have been closed as "not constructive" as well. Shopping recommendations aren't encouraged, which is the same issue with the Server Fault question.
I would argue that all granted monopolies are flawed models. Either they require the use of force to prevent illicit competitors (who are making consensual business transactions with customers), or they serve the demands of the market well enough that there are no illicit competitors (in which case the granted monopoly is by definition unnecessary).
Yes, but even subjective judgements are invalid if they're not based on objective differences.

I disagree here... subjectivity is intrinsically at odds with objectivity. They may sometimes work together (mostly in "I agree with you about this opinion for this reason that both of us can clearly observe"), but calling something subjective "invalid" is calling an opinion invalid. It can't be unless you've decided to have an opinion about a fact (e.g. "I have decided that this spoon, which is clearly silver, is actually copper").
What we learned from using our own product
Looks like some economists rediscovered that old Marxist assumption, that exchange value can vary independently of use value. :P
I don't accept that.
In many domains, subjective ratings are highly correlated across human. For instance, there is such a thing as objective facial beauty: the beautiful faces are those rated as such by most humans (note: gender and sexual preferences matter). (Caveat: beauty vary across cultures.)

What's more interesting is determining which domains are highly correlated (human beauty in current western culture), and which are poorly so (blind wine taste). And that assessment can be backed by much more than uninformed personal opinion.
It is not "not that difficult": as one of the answers explained, it is impossible to create such a function that works for all values - not just -2147483648, which obviously cannot comply, but in your case, also 2147483647.
If you own or manage a website, you're gonna want this.
Free website satisfaction surveys for your visitors.
I think it does carry over in a way. Once I hit a particular amount of rep on stackoverflow, I would start out at 101 rep on any other site, with lets me comment and vote and stuff.
Exactly? The point is that the taste is all in your head.

The point is that the quality of the wine does not seem to be objective, and neither are the descriptors used (oaky flavour, etc.)
Teamprise was the name of the company. (To be pedantic, it was not my company in that I was not a founder; I was an employee.)

I'm embarrassed to say that I'm not certain that I know the new name of the product. Microsoft product names can get a little, em, verbose when you start talking about small parts of bigger products that are also small parts of still bigger products. I think that the name, officially, is "Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 Team Foundation Server Team Explorer Everywhere".

While the acquisition was better for the product (more resources!) and better for customers of it (it's free!), the new name is regrettable.
>He reveled abuses of the American Government to the public

Not according to the government. He blew the whistle on a program that doesn't exist and also doesn't do the illegal things he says it does. So naturally, he's a criminal.

In all seriousness, they can't prosecute him in court without admitting certain facts. So, if they do catch him, he'll probably go to Gitmo and put through some sort of military tribunal.

None of this is legal, but hey, who cares as long I'm protected from the bogey man.
Hell yes. There was a place in the Twin Cities (and by some accounts there still is) that served it on tap... a whole pitcher of pitch black slightly-chocolately slightly-coffeeish gloriousness is a wonder to behold.
Wine isn't bullshit. What's bullshit are sensationalist articles with no substance reaching the top of HN. Where are we, Huffington Post?
my first thought was 'hey, wine has come a long way since the early days'. this is hackernews, not vinternews.
What's the difference between them offering snap-on Glass over existing prescription glasses, and offering an existing Glass model with snap-in prescription lenses? You need to have one or the other, and in both cases it's an addition to normal glasses, not a replacement. Your requirement can never be satisfied for those with sub-par vision.

As for your main point: for this initial model, the main benefit it offers, that I hear from users time and time again, is the instant photo/video capability. Not having to dig your phone or camera out of your pocket / handbag is a huge win for a lot of people in the initial explorer program.

But that's not why I think the product will succeed. I can see the future potential of an always-on heads-up display, and that's just too useful to pass up. Will it ever get there? Maybe not, but I think it has a greater chance of that than failure.
The man did found the EPA.
They were probably using a white wine that was in the middle of the spectrum.

But since you have not tested this hypothesis at all, and have no evidence to back up your claims (like they do), I'm not sure why you think your opinion of bullshit is relevant.
You're making my point. Muni in SF is heavily subsidized, which means there are no transit alternatives available that can compete on price. This makes the only two options for transit very cheap or very expensive, further widening inequality. It's exactly what would be expected by subsidizing transit even more, in fact.
And that is the risk you run with a free market.

If people don't like it, then they can just keep using Taxis, and if it's not profitable for Uber, they will go under.

I imagine a lot of these arguments cropped up when UPS and Fedex came about, to compete with the USPS.
No. For instance, it might be more lucrative to operate a cab company that refuses to service North Lawndale and Englewood in Chicago. The company that provides such restricted service competes at an advantage against those companies who comply with the regulations. That doesn't mean there's a market failure, unless you think "universal coverage" is itself fundamentally a market failure because the free market doesn't "want" to serve Englewood.
Imagine another J. Edgar Hoover.
I think a connoisseur would be more likely to say, "I've tried 10000 things like this, and I like qualities A, B, and C about it, but perhaps dislike D and E. Overall, I like it right now, so it seems good to me, but my tastes will probably change in the future, and not everyone will share them. I look forward to trying more things."

I believe connoisseurs also equate liking things with them being good, they're just less naive about it and don't necessarily proclaim universal goodness. I mean, did Roger Ebert ever give 4 stars to a movie he didn't like?
What's your country? It would be good to know more context here.
That's great but the fact is, these communities are better than anyone else at answering those questions. Why close a good question with good, relevant answers when a better forum doesn't exist?
I'm curious about why you don't think DTrace is that important. If dotCloud were running on a bunch of SmartOS boxes, and assuming that SmartOS was running on the metal and only OS virtaulization was used, then you could use DTrace to observe all levels of the stack from the hardware all the way up to the application. That seems like it would be useful for a PaaS company.
I'm not familiar with these regulations which make a distinction for "street-hail." In every city I've used a taxi in, you can call the taxi company and request a cab to your location. Is this a separate service incidental to the street-hail regulations?
Well it's definitely not treason, but that's because our constitution defines treason in very narrow terms (which I think is good).
One question that might sound silly, but i've grown to think isn't: Why shouldn't the color affect the drinker's perception? Presentation matters, why do we think it's dumb when we are swayed by it?
Well, no, because then people in bad neighbourhoods get screwed over. There is, I'm sure, more than enough business going to good neighbourhoods to keep Uber afloat. So then taxis would only ever be going to bad neighbourhoods.

There is a reason for things like taxi regulation- it's to ensure that everyone is treated fairly.
Similarly, 2009-2010 Malbecs from Mendoza Argentina are very nice and you can get them anywhere between $10-20.
If it helps, I find the priceonomics articles like this unfailingly interesting. I'm not a customer, but it's one of the subsets of posts here on HN which I actually look forward to encountering. They answer questions I've had in ways I hadn't thought of, or present new questions that hadn't occurred to me but which have interesting data-backed answers.
Something like text search should only need partially-homomorphic encryption. For example: encrypt each byte with the same key. Then to search, encrypt the bytes of your search term and send them to the backend. It should be able to find them without knowing what your search term was. There are issues with this exact scheme of course but you get the idea!
>>creating useful discussion

They have said several times that the site is not for discussions. I don't know what is so difficult to understand about that.
Well, that's a cool thought: current DBS leads do have multiple contacts. However, the main reason for this is that exact placement of the leads is not possible. Even with structural MRI and CT scans and so on, the placement is only approximate. So, surgeons have the patient awake and talking etc. to make sure they are not hitting the internal capsule (which would be bad for movement etc.) and then have access to multiple leads which they activate in turn to see which leads are best at mitigating symptoms (i.e. are activating/deactivating the appropriate structure)

What I am very excited about is the concept of neurotrophic chemicals on electrode leads. These chemicals encourage neurons to grow processes towards them, thereby making a better and longer lasting connection with the electrode.

If we ever get to a Neuromancer/Matrix like future where we 'jack in' our brains, I think neurotrophic electrodes with very fine spacing will be part of the technology, so that we can activate many neurons in many different patterns in a well controlled manner.
Don't click 'Like', you can just smile instead
raises a hand

In the early 2000s, I was in the hosting business, and we started using UML (user-mode-linux), then vserver and openvz. When Xen came around, we switched to that, because it made more sense for us (and for our customers): more control, more "this is your machine" feeling.

"Yes, but containers are better because they are lightweight!" Of course, but this idea was pointless back then, because people who wanted really lightweight things went to shared hosting (and for massive PHP hosting, containers can't beat a single Apache instance serving tens of thousands of vhosts; at least not yet).

Maybe (maybe!) things changed with the rise of stacks like Python/Ruby/Node.js/etc for which there are no cheap shared hosting solutions like there is for PHP. Then containers are obviously cheaper than running your own VPS, and easier to setup (and isolate) than shared hosting on a single box.
"personally I've only had one employer since I started working 9 years ago"

I think your experience is an anomaly. I'm nearly 40 and I've had a couple of jobs with something like the freedom you describe (and these [eg. chumby industries] ended only because the company went out of business, not because I left willingly), but the vast majority of jobs, even the supposedly exciting start-up (non-founder) jobs are much more restricted than that.

There's a fairly predictable cycle that occurs at many employers where if you're lucky enough to find a job working on a completely new product (which is ideal for a lot of top developers), you work on that for a year or so, get the first versions out, and then go into a trickle maintenance mode where you're mostly dealing with adding small, mostly unexciting new features. If you were instrumental in helping developing that product, the company will usually be reluctant to let you off of it even if they have other cool things to work on. You tend to get trapped by your early success and become defined by the first project you worked on despite the fact that everyone would probably be better off if you were assigned to the new thing and less experienced developers were put on your maintenance tasks.

To be fair, there are companies out there that don't fall into this trap, but they are few and far between.

Like Michael, I've become pretty blase about job-hopping because of this. If I join your company, I'll give you at least a year and I won't leave you hanging between important release dates, but if you aren't giving me an environment where I am being challenged on a fairly regular basis, don't expect me to be there 3+ years down the line.
The NSA couldn't even catch some college kids in Boston when the Russians phoned it in to Homeland Security 3 months earlier...

Also, if this is an effective mechanism like search warrants why couldn't it go through normal channels? Why do we need secret courts? If it's legit just tell the nation they're being wiretapped and we can have that discussion. Not being able to have a discussion publicly about how the government surveils us is contrary to the very essence of democracy.

If the people cannot consent then the governance is illegitimate according to the rule of law in the US. If wiretapping the nation is a good idea take it to the voters.
> How is Uber not in everybody's best interests?

Poor and elderly people, for a start. Spend a bit of time by the entrance to a major hospital and observe how the other half uses taxis as a lifeline; you might just change your tune.

It may come as a surprise to many people here, but taxis aren't just there to transport privileged rich folks to and from parties. They're an integral part of any well functioning city's transportation system, and handing the keys over in the name of disruption is naive at best and outright dangerous to some of society's most vulnerable populations at worst.

Disclaimer: as a card carrying member of the privileged elite, I've used Uber in the past and will probably do so in the future. I'm merely trying to point out that the taxi industry doesn't exist in a vacuum.
They also didn't mention at what temperature the wines were served at. I'd expect a wine to taste markedly different when served chilled or at room temperature.
Oh, very handy! Great compromise for spike work - real REST, but lightweight.
You are over-thinking it.
Wait, poor people take cabs? Isn't the primary cheap mode of transportation in a large city the bus and train system? That's got to be true for SF and NY at least.

Uber is getting pretty cheap too, regardless. Example: my wife just caught a car to SFO from Berkeley for less than $80, and no tip. That's cheaper than a taxi, friendlier, you can call 10 minutes before you need the Uber, and track it to your door.

A taxi would need to be reserved well in advance, would show up at an indeterminate time, the driver would be indeterminately sleepy, and you'd have to deal with tipping and credit cards. He might be smoking too, and if any of this happened with Uber, you'd leave a bad review. A few reviews, no more driver.

Of course, a person on a budget is going to take BART or a shuttle.
Unfortunately they still haven't understood that "primarily opinion based" questions are valid, very useful and a perfect fit for Stack Overflow.
We always knew NSA existed. Some of the other guys, however...
Has anybody actually read the original study?[1] Brochet did not serve the wines to "wine experts". From the study, emphasis mine: "The wine comparison test was carried out by 54 undergraduates from the Faculty of Oenology of the University of Bordeaux. The sex ratio was 1:1."

Somehow, the results were transformed into, "Wine experts cannot tell the difference between red and white wine!" but that's not a thesis supported by the original paper. What we can conclude is that French undergrads sometimes use similar words to describe both red wines and red-tinted white wines... and that's about it.

[1]: http://www.stanford.edu/class/linguist62n/morrot01colorofodo...
Unfortunately, this doesn't just touch on whether a thing can be judged in any specific capacity objectively. People "like" or "dislike" things for too many reasons to reason about them.

There's a sort of masochism in many of us that results in things that are slightly painful -- e.g. consuming capsaicin -- being pleasurable. Many people are also drawn to abnormalities in human and other physiques and other statistical oddities in nature for various reasons.

Then there are people who perceive the world differently (e.g. the colorblind, the blind, the deaf) who perceive the same things very differently and will thus have differently-formed subjective experiences of the same things as 'standard' humans.

Yes, subjective ratings can correlate. However, that does not mean they're any closer to objective, or any closer to validity or invalidity.
IE10 is over 10% market share. It's great that Microsoft is pushing the auto-update. If you don't care about the straglers, you'll be able to do some really cool stuff across all browsers and leave the legacy behind.
Of course you can hoard transit. You can hoard anything with a limited availability. Since Muni buses are not the TARDIS, there's a limited amount of seats to go around. With buses, hoarding means taking the bus way more often than you need to (like in my example, 5 blocks to the grocery store). If something is free, it doesn't change the underlying scarcity, it just increases demand. To your second point, you are careful to qualify that the world needs to be a utopia in order for your system to work. Good luck with that :)
For those of you that care or for those of you that live in LA, there is a petition going around. Not sure how effective these are, but I signed.

Here--> https://www.change.org/petitions/city-of-los-angeles-repeal-...
I've heard our asteroid belt described like this:

The odds of randomly happening on an asteroid while traveling though the asteroid belt is about the same as randomly happening on a ship in the Pacific Ocean.
It's funny; you say that, but cab drivers are infamous for asking passengers "Where are you going?" and subsequently driving off when they don't like the destination.
Hmm. I'm not well versed with this technique, but I believe the effect of TMS is restricted to cortex (the superficial parts of the brain). To affect deeper regions we would have to make the induced currents stronger, which would perhaps damage the cortex, and would certainly affect cortex as well as the deeper brain regions.
Exactly. It's strange how people think there must be either 100% correlation or none at all.
That would be really useful. Along the same lines, one of the blog posts said that you chose to use strong consistency (CP in CAP). In the event of a failure, how many replicas (out of N) need to be down before the API returns 500s for reads or write (if they are different).
Not bad, thanks for sharing!
Fair point, but I think there is an everyday common threshold we operate with, when an opinion strays too far from any objective characteristics, we say its dumb. It's not a hard and fast rule, but I think we all have some idea where that line is drawn.
Slow initial load for me as well...there is alot of assets in the head that aren't loaded async.

This is kind of a pet peeve of mine for sites that are utilizing so much HTML5...why not use appcache manifests? I understand setting caches directly through the instance, but it might just be me, this is one of my favorite features in server load reduction!
http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1234000000754

maybe this, due to focus on TDD