skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Would light regulation hurt this? Just requiring that all taxi drivers display an ID number, and with some inexpensive process to become a new taxi driver (verifying you're not already banned, that you have a valid license, and if required in Russia, insurance).

The problem with taxi regulation is when "safety" is used as a pretext to reduce supply. I pay a premium in general to get a taxi which is somewhat less likely to be driven by a criminal, and I imagine female/small/weak/foreign/etc. people would pay more of a premium for this. If the regulation is just for the purposes of identification and safety, it wouldn't have a huge cost for the taxi driver ($50 or so and a few hours), and would probably justify an increase in rates to make up for that.

I could easily imagine a private licensing system coexisting with an unlicensed market.
How safe is it? I heard that one of the reasoning for the entire registration of taxi services was that a lot of unlicensed taxis were actually dangerous, and that enforcing registration greatly lowered the amount of crimes happening inside the taxis (at least reports of this).
When a fluff post gets posted some users flag it and some users upvote it.

Is there anyway to penalise the people upvoting a fluff link? Mods have a 'fluff link' flag, and using that applies some karma loss to everyone who upvoted the post and puts a notice on their user page? (This is an ugly kludge. It's meant as a thought experiment rather than a serious implementation idea).

I have made some comments on HN which should have been heavily downvoted but which got no downvotes or even upvotes. I have no idea how this can be fixed.

Some people on HN have an aversion to down voting and flagging and will only use these tools for the most egrarious examples of bad posts. It would be good if people accepted getting and giving downvotes as a useful tool in running the site.

There's another problem with people responding to people who are effectively trolls rather than ignoring or downvoting those posts. I know there are few moderators with very little time. More mods is not the answer, but perhaps 'big downvotes' for those mods would help. Applying a -5 or -10 downvote to people posting aggressive dumb comments would help set tone.

Perhaps having links to all the guidelines (including the links provided to new users) under the submission box would be useful?
IntelliJ IDEA 13: What’s New in Database Tools
One advantage that I see is for example possibility to upgrade applications server and leave db running. You can then switch to new app-server using nginx making this process transaction like (complete successfully or fail completely).
If one clicks next to go beyond the first page repeatedly, there is effectively a timeout how much time can be spend until the link expires and one has to start from the beginning.

I think this makes it more tempting to upvote something just after looking at the headline instead of after reading it, because one has to remember so much or use so many tabs or bear with going back to the front page and clicking next again.

I have no idea about everone's behaviour, but maybe expired links in the end also affect something like users voting up fluff posts?
UK charities highlight importance of patient records for medical research
I replaced my 6 yr old MacBook with a new one. And I regret it (somehow)
My guess is it's to get attention by sparking discussions like this.
is there any example anywhere of dropping the medallion system in a fair manner for those that actually bought their medallion recently?

Why not just return their money?
Why any Startup should learn and know code
1. Yes, that much is true. Though I will claim that is partly a result of the applicant pool. My guess is that most applicants are young adult males.

3. If you're an exec earning $300k at big corp, you are not going to get $300k at a startup, because the startup obviously does not have the revenue or cash of big corp. Ditto for an engineer earning $150k at a tech company. But who said anything about a pittance? It's up to you to set your own salary. You can still pay yourself $100k/year, if that's necessary. The larger point of raising money is not just for paying yourself, but it's for hiring other people.

4. http://ycombinator.com/ycvc.html I made a correction to my post: the amount is now $80k, which is still good considering the assumption is that the money only holds you over until you raise money after Demo Day (say, 6 months). The link is a bit outdated because YC uses SAFEs now. But the notes had no discount and no cap, which are the best possible terms for notes, and that carries over to SAFEs. YC is brokering these. They have their own separate terms, but the terms are available publicly online and are the same for every YC company.
> There will be less than 5 alt-coins (out of the 50+ in existence) that will survive 2014

From what I've seen the number is more like 3-400.

> Bitcoin community will solve problems including that of ‘anonymity’

Sorta already has, it looks like CoinJoin will be implemented into the mainline client when it's mature enough.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=279249.0;all

> Kryptokit and Eric Voorhees’ Coinapult are promising start-ups in this direction.

I desperately hope they don't gain any userbase, they are both woefully insecure products. Kryptokit can't even maintain the claims it's authors make. "It has no central server" — yeah why are these requests going back to your server then? The community suffers when it's relying on insecure, half baked software like that.
If you're a B2C that can't charge customers until you've gained a lot of traction, you should get no investment. How many times does this la-la-land "business" plan of "pay nothing, get everything" have to play out before we recognize it's not a business at all? Facebook is not profitable. Twitter is not profitable. Google's fundamentals are questionable (AdWords is a ripoff), and they lucked out with Google Apps for Business and other sources of direct revenue which similar companies have yet to replicate. And those are the "successful" free products.
it's slightly ironic that the unions in France are strong despite low participation rates , and in the US there's much more participation.

One could argue that , because of collective bargaining, there might not be that many advantages to joining a union in France (the biggest union ends up representing you anyways).
THATS the disrupting part: You can rate your driver online. See https://www.uber.com/drivers You see the rating before you book a ride. This makes all the difference.
Yahoo's News Digest app has solved this so-called problem by only publishing 10 articles twice a day

http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/7/5284300/yahoos-sleek-news-d...
> The problem is, apprenticeships are supposed to be followed by a career as a master practitioner of the craft you apprenticed in

So go be a master. Make your own way. A PhD is not a promise of a salaried future at an academic institution.
Yeah, and then it re-enables itself hours later, according to countless commenters.
I'd be pretty pissed at the guys who forced me to pay a quarter of a million euros.
Ah, yes, you're right. My understanding of unions is indeed limited in the ways that you pointed out.

Not sure I agree with your last statement. It depends... I don't think unions should be able to forcefully close down a shop if the owner can actually resume operations by firing all of the union members. On the other hand I'm completely alright with unions organizing and deciding to go on strike, in order to push for a bargain. I suppose I'm more comfortable with these boundaries because it "naturally" follows from ownership (the union can't shut down a factory because they don't own it) and respect for volition (the employer can't prevent people from willfully organizing).

I also understand that sometimes large corporations prefer to shut down a factory rather than sell the factory to the workers, in order to prevent competition. In this case I'm willing to concede that the workers should be able to purchase the factory from the corporation, as a judgement call that the livelihood of the factory workers are more important than whatever benefit the corporation sees.

But I am not willing to extend the liberties of a labor union to stifle the growth of another company that is winning in the free market. I believe there is more at stake in lost opportunity that way, and so I call such practice "backwards".

I'm probably missing a lot of subtlety here; like if the factory owner can fire all of the union workers during a strike, isn't that akin to the factory worker banning unions outright? I really don't know the answer.
Well, my feeling was the opposite. I was impressed with the execution, but not the content. My first thought when I read "it's about what we make you feel", was that someone at Sony saw this spot by Apple and decided they wanted to do something similar: http://www.apple.com/designed-by-apple/

They start by saying "we are engineers, but we are also artists", then they spend the rest of the ad creating this separation between engineers and artists, that seems to be common to most electronics companies, like this:

"You don’t wear a TV. You do wear the Personal 3D Viewer. So, we had to rethink our process. We started by designing from the inside out but ended up with a chunky, unwieldy viewer. So we reversed tack and designed the outside first. Only then did we arrange the internal workings and make something desirable to both watch—and wear."

The reality is that Sony has _always_ been focused on how things look and on making things smaller, there are many stories about how their product managers would carry around a wooden replica of the final product as they wanted it to be, challenging the engineers to make it smaller and make it all fit (open up an early MiniDisc player, and you'll see this process at work :).

So this just makes the whole ad look like it's created by a marketing department that doesn't know anything about Sonys history and its design philosophy.
Time travel on photos
Every node.js developer should know npm shrinkwrap
Why would you need an ID from a taxi driver? If you're scared a taxi driver's gonna rob or rape you (a common concern among ladies) you remember or photograph his plate number (or ask your friend to do so). An official government paper wouldn't make it any more safer. It would only add problems for drivers since they would have to acquire those licences, it would increase corruption and decrease supply, which would in turn raise prices. If you care about safety, call a licenced taxi company - your choice, isn't it?

Update: I misread you. "licensing system coexisting with an unlicensed market" is definitely the state of things in Russia currently. I think that's a good way to go. Except maybe that since licensing is not required, then safety may be guaranteed by non-governmental agencies or maybe even technologies (as mentioned in another comment below).
This seems quite disingenuous to say the least. I'm a French living in Paris, and have never had any trouble getting a cab, unless I happened to be in one of those neighborhoods that are completely deserted at night. In that case you'd have to call one up.

Maybe the cabs you were trying to get already had customers on board. Hint : if a taxi is free, the light on top of it is green. If it's red, there's already a customer on board.
The basic answer seems to be: in Europe, you're in school until you finish your MSc, but once you start the PhD you're basically just considered a junior-ranked research professional and paid accordingly, even if your de jure status is "student". In much of the rest of the world, including but not limited to the Anglosphere, the BSc is the terminal degree, a MSc is a consolation prize for failing your PhD, and a person doing a PhD is considered very definitely a student, with the loss of pay, permanence and status that entails.
For me, LINQ was definitely a "gateway feature" to the lisp world. If you still use C# at work, I strongly suggest checking out F#: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7048522
The difficult exam is only needed for drivers who want to pick up people without a prior booking.

It's much easier to be a taxi driver if you only accept telephone booking rides.
@mailarchis had a great point :)

Example automation script:

println("Opening Google");
browser.openPage("http://www.google.com");
browser.waitForSelector("[name=q]", 2);
browser.getElement("[name=q]").sendKeys("Hello World");
println(browser.getTitle());

It's not much of an example we are accepting early access requests though :) You will definitely get more details on automation scripts.
Lajes de Betão de Edifícios Correntes com Pós-Tensão
China's Titanic replica will simulate maritime tragedy for entertainment
This post kind of inspired me to whip this up (probably not original, but it's minimal): https://bitbucket.org/logannc/deterministichashpass

Basically the same idea but seeds a random number generator with the master password and the service name to have an infinite supply of passwords. Technically no state is needed because Python's random module is deterministic, but I will end up saving the state with the service name and the index of the random number so that I don't have to try each and every one (not that I change passwords that often, for better or worse).

And, for convenience, since I won't be saving the master password, I'm looking into adding a credential cache like sudo has.
> They would have some market shares but not very much, just like Amazon.com is a small player and one of few foreign survivors in China although I also like its service. In the past, MSN messenger, Yahoo, Google, eBay, MySpace, to name a few, all failed in competition with local China players.

Then why doesn't the CCP just unblock twitter, facebook, g+, and so on? I have a hard time to believe its for reasons of porn (easy to find in the GFW) or subversion (also easy to find in the GFW). And how do you explain Facebook's success in HK and Taiwan? People outside of China just being afraid of Chinese services? That could make sense...

> As for management, the biggest problem of foreign companies is that decisions especially critical ones are always made in USA, which is normally slow and ignorant.

The biggest problem is that we can't play very well at all in the market. First, foreign companies have to follow all the rules very strictly: local companies have the ability to be "flexible" until (and if!) the government cracks down; they also don't have to deal with the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). The lawyers of most foreign companies also won't go near ambiguous China privacy and secrecy laws with a 100 ft. pole, meaning anything that deals with data or communication inside the GFW absolutely requires a local partner (say TomTom).

I have friends who worked or are working for local companies, and they tell stories of extreme shadiness. These are not even small no-name companies, but companies you've probably heard of before; I won't name names since the foreign community that works in these companies is very small. They work very hard, but the market is cut throat and they do what they need to do to survive.
It's weird, it looks good on my machine, using FF25 on Ubuntu.
VisitorEngage is a SaaS platform to get a feedback button, run fastest surveys/polls & proactively push notifications on your website based on visitor behavior.

Instant setup, built for marketers.
I'm the founder/ceo of this. We launched in beta around a month ago. Looking to know the views of HN community.
This algorithm seems to be based on edit distance so should be a poor fit for the OCR field, since OCR rarely swaps letters.
Where do you live in France? (I live near Nice.) Please send me an email, it's in my profile.
I've settled on running 5 or 6 containers rather than one big one with 5 or 6 processes because:

I can host some containers on other physical hosts - I don't need to keep thinking (what if I fill up the biggest droplet on Digital Ocean) - If one of the services dies or needed kicking - 5/6 of the stack is unaffected - Orchestration is really only a matter of network endpoints getting written to environment variables - not too taxing

Running everything is one container also has it's advantages - like being able to push the whole stack as one image.
Do teenagers not need fathers? I understand what you're saying, but the point is that it's silly to set up a false dichotomy between entrepreneurship and family and attempt to force the entrepreneur to choose. I believe that the startup community is much poorer because of the tendency to do this, and I'm extremely suspicious of anyone who'd advocate it.
There are good investors and there are bad investors.

Good investors won't take board control after a seed financing and will understand if someone with a family takes a $100k+ salary.

Now, if you're a 20-something who can survive on ramen, a mattress on the floor, and internet, investors will be very suspicious of you taking a $150k salary.

Expectations shift.
Not sure why you're telling me this, I suggested MSP430 to the parent post as an answer for the ISA he was looking for.
I think it's safe. But I'm not a lady. Even if I was a lady and was really concerned for my safety while riding cabs, why wouldn't I call a licenced taxi company instead and pay more for my safety? The problem with requiring everyone to be licenced is that you force customers who are less concerned about their safety to pay for those who are more concerned.
Well man, send some of your good investors to Salt Lake. We need them up here.
As a Turkish, I think i know little better what is going on here;

It is the high school kids that they think it is cool to mess up with big and serious systems in their stupid way. It is fun for them to mess up rules which I think is the same for most of the teenagers around the world. They try to break things, don't listen teachers, don't go to school.

They think that they should be doing what they want instead of what others want them to do.

The outcome for the turkish teenagers irritating behaviour showed in Google's Play Store. That is all what i can see.

Aren't we all tired of these kids actions around us sometimes? :)
You know there were black cabs before satnav, right?
Bashing french unions certainly is fun, but please note that there absolutely no evidence (in the article) that the attack was perpetrated by a french taxi driver. This article is either very poorly documented or consciously misleading (or both).

> There’s no confirmation that this attack came from the protesting taxi drivers; however, that certainly seems to line up with the sentiment felt by taxi drivers these days – unwarranted hate.
I don't dispute that windows developers are in the majority - I dispute that other choices are as vanishingly rare as your initial comment suggested.

Anecdotally (I work at a large corp), slightly under half our devs use Linux. You only need to look at the array of software-for-programmers that's available under Linux to see that it's an extremely popular choice - the availability of programming software and libraries is generally better under Linux than it is under Windows.

While linux is certainly a bit more hassle to maintain than windows (I use a mac when given the choice, which i find gives me the best of both worlds), it's still a clearly superior environment for highly technical users. It's only recently with the introduction of Powershell that Windows has stopped being a substantial handicap for developers, imo.
While it might be hard to defend the incumbent taxi industry, and Uber generally seems to be a "good thing" (not convinced that surge pricing is worthwhile however, I don't think that drivers are reactive enough that increasing price will increase supply when its needed, plus the backwards bending labor curve, but I digress). There might be some reasons for regulating taxis, but things like the medallion systems seem to have been a failure.

Hotels are a different matter entirely: firstly, hotels are usually already pretty correctly priced, and services are usually good (in my experience at least). Secondly, the reasons for hotel regulation are still pretty relevant:

- I don't want my neighbor to sublet constantly, and have people run around. The commons (hallways and stuff) will probably get degraded, and my life will be generally shittier (see various stories about subletters).

- On a more maco-level, with things like rent control, subletting makes the supply even more constrained. Between getting rid of subletting and getting rid of rent control, I'd rather get rid of rent control, but in the meantime subletting is also kind of awful.

airbnb's disruption is not uncontroversial
This is exactly what happened here in Ireland in 2000. The market was deregulated overnight and there was a flood of new taxis on the roads.

Needless to say existing taxi drivers weren't very happy as a lot of them had paid around €100,000 for their license. They were effectively worthless after deregulation.

All this was great news for consumers of course. Before deregulation it was practically impossible to get a taxi in Dublin on weekend nights. I can recall queuing for hours in the cold and wet for the privilege of being dropped home.

The taxi drivers mightn't like deregulation but you can't hold the general public to ransom by operating a closed market. Of course the government should have handled the whole thing better by doing some sort of deal with the drivers who'd paid so much for licences thinking it was a long term investment.
The commentary in the channel one is a bit off. With size 1+ it's a buffered channel and as such you could do what's shown in a single goroutine without blocking:

package main

func main() {
c := make(chan bool, 1)
c <- true
println(<-c)
}

It'd be unbuffered if there were no holding space, i.e. make(chan bool, 0) or simply make(chan bool)†. Cool project though - subscribed.

---

† Yes, built-in functions get not only generics privilege, but overloading too. It's evidently not as pitchfork-worthy.
Enjoyed watching these so far, great to see someone stepping up to help get people started with golang.

Thanks
As much as I generally dislike the iOS ecosystem, Xcode and Apple in general this feels like complaining about nothing much of importance to me...

If you want to share code this becomes a non-issue - you include the code which can detect things like architecture and target at compile time and then its possible to not just transcend the boundary between iOS and OS X, but also Windows Desktop + RT, Android, other *nix flavours and that great operating system that will be released in 7 years time that we don't even know about yet...

a static library is a convenience of pre-compiled code, but also an inconvenience where you can't see inside or implement the many cool things you can with the preprocessor, meta-programming or even scripts that generate code or enforce constraints if you feel so inclined...

Why do you really want static libraries to be usable? Are they really a good thing? Is it really any more convenient than just including a folder of source code in the project?

The only real argument I can see is if you want to keep your code secret which I am philosophically opposed to in the general case...
Google puts bought links above and to the side of their search results. These links are clearly separated labelled advertisements and are thus no different to any other online/print advertisements

That is not by a very long stretch of the imagination the same as what Yelp does.

Yelp offer to bury negative reviews in exchange for payment. That's the very definition of extortion.