skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Taxis have a regulated taxi-meter. These are auditable and they enforce the set rates. This meter is a requirement to pick up people from the street with no booking.

Cabs do not have a meter. The customer can set a price before the journey. These must be pre-booked by phone. In theory there is a lot of regulation around criminal checks etc.

Uber exists in a grey middle ground. They are booked via the app; and the app acts like a meter. The regulator for London has recently said that the app is not a meter and thus Uber is fine.

So long as Uber is complying with local laws I'm fine with them operating. I guess they should be prepared for some of the backlash they'll face when an Uber driver murders a passenger. (Because, with a large enough number of drivers and passwngers and years it'll happen some time).
Income taxes for drivers likely do not benefit the municipalities where the cars are driving. e.g. The drivers would be consuming space and wear and tear in NYC, but living in Jersey. NYC roads and services necessary to support increased congestion get burdened, but no tax dollars help support them.

A regressive policy has nothing to do with the goal of the medallions. They cost what market forces will support. The goal of high-end watches is to keep poor people from knowing what time it is.

The medallions aren't for infrastructure. I'd argue the medallions are supported by both the city and existing cabbies because of congestion and quality management issues. It's a way to ensure minimal levels of service and to punish bad (well, abhorrent) service.

The tax on fares is for infrastructure and administration. In NYC, $.50/trip is imposed. What's Uber paying?

I guess Uber couldn't know when it was dealing with a NYC fare subject to the tax... Oh, wait they couldn't offer that since it would imply they were a taxi service subject to other regs... So, they have to flaunt all the laws and put themselves in a legal bind that isn't all "just obvious barriers to entry."
>I had to create one at some point simply to be able to download something for free.

I only use bugmenot for those sites.
Unfortunately there wasn't much budget for anything beyond the build. But the accessibility audit was lead by visually impaired people, and they did suggest what the benchmark was I had to meet and we iterated over that by me making changes and them flagging up what else needed to be done.

I also have the impression that there are quite a few people with older browsers out there because of the screen reader setup, and I don't think that's a good thing, but maybe it's a matter of doing what we're doing to older browsers in general: phase out support.
Speaking as a colour-blind person (protanopia) I welcome this kind of thoughts with open arms. There's actually not much you have to do in order to make a website at least readable if you just have some basic concepts in mind when designing.

The latest fad with soft pink and grey is really bad, almost unreadable for me. Luckily, I can usually just select the text and get blue/white contrast, which makes it more readable, but lately I've seen people override this too, or simply just hijack the ability to select text. I could open it in a screenreader or something similar, but usually I just close the tap and move along. Just keep that in mind if you decide to override how the browser behaves.

A funny side note, which was very clear on this website: When you're using pie charts, also know that it's almost impossible for colour-blind people to read them. The only two I could pick out was Chrome and IE11.
The article on publicly executing Ronald Mcdonald is priceless

http://www.clickhole.com/blogpost/its-time-publicly-execute-...
Do you mean the tool that can be found on inform7.com? That looks really, really painful to write in.
Declassified report: Two nuclear bombs nearly wiped out North Carolina
If you're coming from SF and are used to the quality of the restaurants in a foodie city, Seattle is mostly just presentation.
It definitely feels that way to me too, but I've been told by a neuroscience researcher that a lot of neuroscience research is done with small sample sizes. She even showed me one of her journals, and I didn't find a single paper that had more than 50 participants.
Agreed. The name for this is "regulatory capture."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
>On data privacy, like in football, we are playing in the same direction; to score a goal and win the Championship for a gold standard in privacy protection! A combined EU-Brazil team can be a winner.

Did that sound any better in French or German?!
The whole article sucks. They mischaracterize products as just cloud products, people as just cloud people, companies as just cloud companies. They even completely bastardize the definition of 'cloud' itself as "lots of computer servers working together for various tasks." Holy shit, 'cloud' has been around since the 1980s?!

(Incidentally they use the word 'cloud' 27 times in the article)
I don't think a screen reader would pick up the down-voted comments as different from other comments. So, it's still broken from an accessibility standpoint.
That's actually true. Greece demonstrated what happens after a default, and then Cyprus did. In both cases it didn't prevent them from reissuing bonds and selling out.
I don't know how the rust runtime or this project achieves portability, but I don't think cygwin is a great example. It might appear to work well on the surface but it is a heavy layer, which comes at performance cost and is somewhat inelegant.

Maybe cygwin is OK if you are fine with the costs and want to maximize the amount of Unix-like functionality (and you don't hit the bugs - I have seen some very nasty ones in the cygwin dll - deadlocks, random crashes). But something like MinGW/msys does a much better job of compiling for Windows.
MixRank (YC S11) is looking for our second sales hire
JavaScript instiation overhead of different constructor patterns
Guidelines for a better UX of Email Unsubscribe Pages
Big Potential for Vietnam’s IT Services
Yeah, because you need industrial strength security to download Java or protect your precious NCAA brackets.
For more from the front lines in the fight against linkbait, see this twitter account: https://twitter.com/SavedYouAClick
I'm pretty sure this was discussed at ng-conf and it wasn't implemented by the core team after another team in Google asked them for the same functionality.

I see service workers and web sockets (the client) dealing with the additional overhead of SPA in future. Merging the backend and frontend would just kill it for many companies as you're dictating backend for a frontend framework.

Too opinionated IMO.
Evaluating Rails Projects
I think Facebook has tried to block them but they pop up all over the place. The latest one seems to be PetFlow, which is ostensibly some sort of pet site but it's churning out clickbait like mad.

In short, I don't think FB has been particularly effective, though I admire(d) the goal.
Photo by the University of Sheffield – Department of Psychology
Trinity College Dublin joins growing number of EU institutions offering MOOCs
I lived Downtown for a few months, then in Ballard.
At a stopover in an airport in Sweden, they had password protected locking compartments with a multitude of chargers that you could leave your phone in for free, so that you didn't have to stay in one location while your phone was charging. I was a bit sleep deprived and almost forgot my phone, but other than that the convenience was great. Definitely something American airports should get.
Simbase: A vector similarity nosql database over redis protocol
Simbase is a redis-like vector similarity database. You can add, get, delete vectors to/from it, and then retrieve the most similar vectors within one vector set or between two vector sets. https://github.com/guokr/simbase
> All of those spaces revolve around monitoring

It's not only monitoring because it's not passive, they interact with the system and make changes on the fly, so it's making in a sense too.
it doesn't need to. If it's faster than the whole 'caching' procedure, than it is faster regardless.
It's kind of insane, but I live a block away from the Walters Art Museum, and i've been inside three times, yet i'm spending more time reflecting on the pieces from this website than at the museum itself.

https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/collection/the-walt...
Show HN: Swift Matrix Library
Ask HN: Best Accelerator/Incubator in LA?
What was the most valuable part of going through a Accelerator/Incubator in LA?

Any reason(s) not to join one?
Live sports, mainly. I don't regret it, per se (although I no longer watch live sports on cable, ironically, MLB.tv is more than adequate for my needs now). But we're still predominantly Netflix, with some Amazon Prime Instant mixed in here and there. In an ala carte world I think we could get by with just Cartoon Network and HBO, with our current viewing habits, and honestly I think we could do without those without much pain (would just have to buy Game of Thrones elsewhere).
Good work, bro! Main criticism is that the 1st chapter took forever though.
This kind of initiative is really great. It's refreshing to see the governments of major powers unite in order to enshrine protections for their citizens.

It really paints a stark contrast with the USA-Russia-China totalitarianesque power bloc, though. Our government in the US is currently weaseling out of net neutrality while strongly pushing for omni-surveillance in addition to the usual drumbeat of anti-liberty measures in the name of security. Here, the message is that you have no privacy from the state, and if you want privacy from the corporate branch of the state, you're probably a criminal.

I really wish we could point to this and shame our politicians into following suit.
iOS is also fragmented. I know many people with iphone 3gs's or the original ipads and are stuck on a previous version of ios.

(one could argue they need to upgrade devices -- well, the same can be argued for android users)

So, both sides of the fence or fragmented.
"But the inability to replicate the experience in full, I think , inhibits catering to that demographic."

That makes me think of trying to see what it feels like to be inaccessible user, I'm picturing a VM that makes the screen fuzzy or something.

If all you want is a VM with the tools installed - that's pretty simple. I imagine every developer can make a VM with an OS in it, and there are plenty of free accessibility tools available for the OS of your choice: http://usabilitygeek.com/10-free-screen-reader-blind-visuall...
A user deletes their Facebook or Twitter account. I don't have their email address. They try to login and can't. They have to now email me and prove to me which account is theirs so I can reset the password, give it an email and let them regain access.
The account may be a free account but it can still contain data a user wouldn't want to lose. Ensuring from the get go that they can recover their data just makes things easier.

Regardless of how legitimate you think my usage of email addresses is the inability to even ask for it _is_ a downside. For those use cases that do require it immediately you now have a system where the user clicks the 'Login without filling in a form' button and gets thrown to a form anyway, which is exactly what we were trying to avoid.
Boeing Unveils Commercial CST-100 "Space Taxi"
Ugh, no. There are times when the Google Maps route would take way longer than even reasonably obvious alternative routes. Particularly in London. Google tries to pick the quickest route, but these roads are often way too busy.

As usual it turns out that there are good & bad taxi drivers, and good & bad mini-cab drivers / companies too.
Seattle has a potential, but it's not a boom until we see more VC/angel activity, which is a good indicator.

It has a pretty good tech scene. Most startups are still consumer oriented though, so Jared Wray, CTO from CenturyLink, is wrong :-)
Google's cached version

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:XVk3yBR...
The first computer I ever got to see and touch in person was an Apple IIe. My buddy in the Air Force got it, and let me play on it. Wonderful li'l machine. First time I stayed up all night playing a game, text of course.
You'd think "useful search" would be a vital part of the Amazon website but look how terrible search is.
Keeping Live Events Running Smoothly: Part 1
On Seattle weather, it actually gets less rain than NYC and virtually never gets biting cold-- I play outdoor sports year round, 90% of the time, I'm wearing shorts. Current lawn status: brownish from lack of rain and getting browner. :-/

Definitely more gray than average, but fares pretty well on pleasant temps (source: http://www.kellegous.com/j/2014/02/03/pleasant-places/ ).
Create a script to follow those urls and migrate and byebye?
Although it sucks I wouldn't claim it's a shady business model. It seems more like the obvious one - make the custom URL option paid and they have their pricing clearly laid out - https://bitly.com/a/pricing

And you have a few days to crawl the URLs and see what you get.
It's the other way around in London parlance. Taxis are more tightly regulated but have freedom to pick up from ranks, can be flagged in the street, etc. Minicabs (sometimes generically called "cabs") are also regulated but to a much lesser extent and are predominantly private drivers.
Delete All Your Tweets With Ruby
Curious to the benefits of this. Is Rust performant and on par with the native C version of coreutils? Seems the readme makes a big deal about being easy to compile on windows (which has never been a problem for me, I just use Cygwin or something).

Also, comments like this make it seem this is not "fully baked" yet and still needs some dev time:

> fn parse_date(str: &str) -> u64 {

> // This isn't actually compatible with GNU touch, but there doesn't seem to

> // be any simple specification for what format this parameter allows and I'm

> // not about to implement GNU parse_datetime.

> // http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=gnulib.git;a=blob_plai...
Amazon's UX on Prime Instant on the PC is so terrible, their discoverability on ANY platform is awful, and they have restricted HD streaming of Prime content (i.e., stuff you don't have to buy) to non-PC platforms only. And I've had far more problems with buffering on Prime Instant on Xbox 360 than I have ever had with Netflix, despite watching roughly five times as much content on Netflix. It's ridiculous.

Their music offering looks like more of the same. Lower selection, poor discoverability, a second-class UI on PC. I really wish Amazon would stop re-purposing their storefront UI for every product they can, and actually design a decent UI for their various products.
Tenure shouldn't be the solution.

And I'm not sure how the problem you describe is limited to public schools? If my manager doesn't like me (for whatever reason), he can find a way to have me removed from my job. Nitpick every minor problem, make-work assignments, untenable deadlines, etc.
Did anybody really understand how to do the javascript thing? Up to now I've only read about people cheating.

edit:

/SPOILER

literally the moment I clicked "send" on this comment I thought about using the console to execute some javascript... welll.
Time to scrape the URLs and resolve them yourself!
N.Korea's Kim blasts weather service for 'incorrect' forecasts
Dead on arrival? How? Why is there the expectation that every song in an album would be free under Prime?

"This free music is lame because it's not the music I wanted for free?"

Do you tell stores their free samples suck because you wanted a free sample of a different product?
If your product is taking off, learn from your mistake of not following the ToS and just build your own in-house URL shortener.
I'm the same way (averse to IDEs, preferring Vim over them) and while I haven't tried Xcode, I've got to say, I'm really enjoying the opposite direction of Visual Studio. Especially with ReSharper, it's one of the better IDEs I've used. Haven't tried the latest VS (2013) but 2010 and 2012 have been great. The only thing is, as of late, VS2012 feels a bit chunkier than 2010 did, making it feel slower. Having said that though, it's still very usable.

It's nice to have Vim for my Ruby/Python scripts and something like Visual Studio for C#, I really don't mind given the lovely environment it provides.
I feel it's a little underhanded call it shady while simultaneous admitting the information was there in a document you opted not to read as you built your business around it.
I thought about this, but they still have the problem that the old links shared won't resolve.

EDIT: mseebach is right, they just have to copy the link format
I clicked this (original title, via the Facebook page) as someone recently posted that HN doesn't earn anything in the "why was HN down" thread after those filesystem changes

I wonder if the click-bait-ish title was inspired by that post
As the author of this piece, I'd be happy to look at doing something similar for Google I/O if the structure of the presentation lends itself to such an article.

Appreciate the kind words and nudge in the direction of doing more.
Very true. Not shying away from my responsibility. I'm mostly to blame. And still - can't say I like bit.ly's way of doing business.
So... aside from the hot air, the only concrete thing I got from that press release was that the EU politicians are so pissed that the EU court struck down their draconian data retention laws that they're going to pass a new one that resolves the technicalities on which the old one was struck down.

And apparently, this is somehow going to bring the EU to "a gold standard in privacy protection". What?
The rush to redefine a better Turing test seems pretty misguided in light of the fact that we all agree that "Eugene" in fact fails any reasonable interpretation of it, quite badly, and the real problem here is the credulousness or even outright lying of the people who ran the test.

A bot that could persistently convince a person of average intelligence that it was human across an extended period of time would still be quite the thing. A bot that could convince me that it was human would require someone to leap some pretty significant AI barriers that so far nobody has even come close to. It may not be the touchstone of "true AI" because that's a very slippery term, but it's a legitimate milestone, and the fact that it's 2014 and "Eugene" is still the best we have(give or take a bit) is evidence for the idea that it's a hard test, not evidence against!

It doesn't matter what test we use... credulous or deceptive people are still going to prematurely cry "success!". Twiddling with the test isn't solving the real problem here. (Again, as always, step one is solving the problem is identify the problem. It's often harder than it seems at first....)
Why not? They have their own domain that they'll presumably point to a new service.
I guess a few other businesses will be approached by them same way.

Running your own shorter sounds like a must these days.
LoopBack: performance issue with relational databases
it concerns me that you think you can call yourself a senior web developer without even once reading the w3c specification, because that would be crazy
I would ask support about that, Amazon seems to be usually adept at handling such service calls. They handled our complaints in the past that were similar to this quite nicely.
If you click on "pricing" you will see this: "STARTING AT $995/month". I think that's pretty clear. Maybe the service changed and they started to charge and they didn't notify you.

Link: https://bitly.com/a/pricing

And a quote:

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" - Robert J. Hanlon.

---

Edit (please read this)

Oz Kats said: "as of april last year when we signed up for bit.ly that page was nowhere to be found"

My reply:

That actually changes everything.

As I understand, they are not retaining your data, but will pull the plug on a service you now depend and are not offering migration options, am I correct? This is certainly an awful business practice it could be illegal, but there is a problem.

At the time they failed to communicate the pricing so you started using their service, judging it would be free. If they started to charge, you could just pay or move to another provider, but the very model of their tool makes it impossible for you to truly "migrate" to another provider since the links are widespread, this isn't exactly their fault (nor yours).

If they are charging you 995$ just because they know you are out of options you might have a case, but that's so time/money consuming I would advise you to just do your best to migrate the widespread links.

Best of luck
>if I usually log in from the US, why am I suddenly logging in from Russia, less than a half-hour since I logged in via the US?

This can happen if you use Tor, a proxy, etc.
Not sure why they don't just brute force their data out. Back when Google was hiding Google I/O redeem codes with goo.gl links, I brute forced thousands of links out of that shortener, just using 20 lines of bash script. I was just trying random codes and got one that led to a URL once per second or so.

So I could pull down 300k links in a few days. Their case would be a lot quicker because it sounds like they have all the valid bit.ly links, just not where they lead to.
The challenge with Seattle isn't the amount of rain. It's the amount of days of precipitation. It's the angst of not knowing what the weather will be, making planning difficult for some outdoor activities. It's that our weather people use the term "sun breaks." Sun. Breaks. Yeesh.

I have spent 12 years in Seattle, 7 on this go round. I hate the weather here. You are wet and cold all winter. The mountains get snow, but sometimes rain, which freezes the snow, or makes the snow go away, negating the snow possibilities. The fact that you are surprised by how low the sun is on the horizon on a rare sunny day in winter, because you so rarely see the sun in the winter, is certainly entertaining. Let's also not forget the sun rises at 8:30A and sets at 4P in the winter.

The 2 months of sunny weather from July 5th are amazing. When the sun is out, this place is absolutely beautiful. But, for reference, I went for an early morning training ride yesterday and it was 44 degrees at 5:30A. In June. June!

Insofar as cost of living, this place is cheaper for housing, though the market is tight in the mid-market range for houses. Public schools are reasonably good depending on the district. Tech employers are not as voluminous as the articles would have you believe. IME, the Valley has way more tech opportunity, and less concentration in a a very small handful of large employers.
With both the taxi and hotel industries being disrupted (technical meaning), I wonder if there's a pattern here... Is it a direct consequential of the web, enabling new ways to connect customers and providers? Or, deeper societal forces at work, making this a general time of change for other, non-technological reasons?

Or just coincidence...?
Scientists condemn 'crazy, dangerous' creation of deadly airborne flu virus
JavaScript: Read-only Attributes
> You cannot just continue from where you were previously.
Wrong. There is a resume button.
Because our managers use IE9.
If you keep track of either the short URL or the long URL somewhere on your end, you can get the other part using bitly's link API: http://dev.bitly.com/links.html and the associated metrics with the link metrics API: http://dev.bitly.com/link_metrics.html -- Once you have that, you can write a simple app (or use any of the free ones out there) to provide the same service.

Or honestly, just pay the $700 if it's not worth the dev investment and provides a significant value to your service.
Linkbait/Clickbait self-referential title announcing the website: "This One Website Made a Fortune Just By Publishing Sensationalist Headlines - Truth Or Fiction?"