skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure about the comparison with Uber, but I definitely agree with you on how Airbnb's main innovation is finding a loophole around certain laws that are for the benefit of everyone. In Uber's case, however, I believe they were circumventing corrupt laws, put in place to help the medallion holders over anyone else. The taxi dispatch system is antiquated, and if it wasn't Uber or Lyft coming around to change it, it would most certainly have been someone else.

I don't believe Uber's only innovation is circumventing laws, because Uber can't be run using a simple spreadsheet. Airbnb can, I know that because it used to be.
Not a prank shot - they have actually managed to convince generations of kids to clean their school's toilets using chemicals and no special training. They mask it as "culture" but it's a cost saving measure, they could be getting lessons and an education during that time.
I, having been burned many times, have developed an allergy to the latest new shiny thing, especially if heavily promoted. The number of such things that have been successful are lost in the mass of those that have not. For every C#, there's a hundred Microsoft Bobs.

Investing scant resources (and your time and mind-share are among the most precious you have) in a technology before it has developed a following, third-party support (tools and libraries), a viable user base, and the resources to educate yourself and others is a significant gamble. Sure, you might win. But you probably won't.
"I've seen a 50+ developers project with an active trunk where Git was a blocker because it was hard to push your code because of other people pushes"

That's a clear misunderstanding of how to use git. The whole idea of having a single source tree is unnecessarily limiting - everybody works in their own branches, pushes to a origin/github remote, and when their work is gtg for the trunk, they, in their branch do a git pull --rebase, or alternately do a `git fetch; git rebase origin/master`. If they haven't touched any files that other people have touched, it just moves their branch point off of the current tip of origin/master, and they can merge their changes into master and push.

The only time it should be hard to push code is if both people made changes to the same file, and realistically, the same lines of a file. Then you get a merge conflict which is awesome, because it's made you aware that what you're working on and what somebody else is working on may be overlapping.
Japanese dont litter ? This must be a good joke !! Japanese litter everywhere where they feel safe to do it. Go to a Hanabi Taikai (fireworks in summer) and on your way back you will be WALKING on litter for 1 kilometer. Go hiking in the mountains and you will see the extent of Japanese littering when noone is looking. Mountains of cans thrown away by hikers. Go in the countryside and see whay people leave on the side of the street. Oh yeah, they do litter just like everyone else, they are just a little more ashamed to do it public, and in the city the public services are just very efficient at cleaning up anyway.
Some very interesting analysis, and in some ways, it raises even more interesting questions about the sampling at IMDB. Who is filling out IMDB reviews and ratings? How many segments are there among the raters, and to what extent are they truly representative of the general, TV-watching population?

Looking at the list, for instance, you see that Dragon Ball Z shows up as one of the highest-rated shows of its decade. Now, perhaps a truly randomized, representative sample of the population really would rank Dragon Ball Z as one of the greatest TV series ever made. But my gut tells me that's unlikely. More likely is that a big cluster of fans of the show have self-selected into rating it highly. What you're actually seeing, in this case, is the power of a very vocal, very rabid niche. [1]

This same effect, in reverse, can artificially deflate the ratings of shows and movies that a vocal minority of the population rallies against. This appears to be the case with Gunday, one of the lowest-rated movies on the site, which David Goldenberg of FiveThirtyEight discusses in a very interesting post: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-story-behind-the-wor...

Finally, we need to filter the data set for size. Ice TV, a show from 1996 with all of 6 ratings on its IMDB page, probably wouldn't pass our gut check for "Best of the 90s," alongside shows like The Sopranos and Friends, which probably got ratings more or less representative of public opinion.

This is a fascinating subject and a really compelling start. But the next step in this sort of analysis is developing a reasonable methodology for parsing and reconciling quality, quantity, and clusters. To give the author due credit, he expresses the appropriate amount of skepticism or reservation when showing results. And his observations about genre and overall trends are fascinating to see.

[1] Of course, this raises some intriguing questions about what, exactly, a "quality" show is. A show that has a large, thriving fanbase is a great show to that fanbase. And to the extent it's attracted a sizable, rabid following, it can probably be said to be a great show in general -- even if it's not everyone's cup of tea. And that's probably fine. Obviously not every show is going to appeal to everyone in the population. Nevertheless, strong-niche shows confound our idea of "generally" great shows and make normative comparisons very hard to do, unless we start factoring for things like strength of sentiment.
It can, actually, be quite hard. But, yeah, if you want it bad enough, it can be done.

(Also: you haz a typo)
Of course it was an arguing tactic, it was an attempt to respond to yummyfajitas' race-baiting. If you want to be morally outraged, try reading the comment section of his marginalrevolution link.
> It is also a direct result of a Sarin gas terrorism attack that hit the Tokyo subway system in 1995,

Precisely, the author is just plain ignorant. By the way the same thing happened in France after the metro bombinga.
Discourse.tv | The Video Experience Hackathon at Kaltura Connect 2014
> but literally scrubbing the classroom floors. Even one photo of the guys cleaning the urinals. Maybe a prank shot. But may as well not be.

The kids have to. You know, it's imposed by the teachers.
All the nice reviews do indeed raise spirits. The most wonderful moments are when I get an email from a kid that is now inspired to get into programming and start building games. So yes, thank you for the kinds words! :fistbump:
Interesting molecular gastronomy idea: Take the carotene butter as mentioned, mix with tapioca maltodextrin to make a carrot flavored powder, then take carrot cake cupcakes with a buttercream frosting make with carotene butter and drizzle the powder on the frosting as a topping. I haven't tried this, but there should be enough carrot in one cupcake to turn your skin orange for a week.

You are generally correct that leaving in the same phase is not as interesting as changing phase.
I recently did some research on robot state-of-the-art, and Baxter is one of the standouts. Baxter combines advanced sensors with an interesting approach to learning a mechanical routine, ostensibly trained by a factory line worker, not a programmer. The founder was also one of the iRobot founders: http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2013/rodney-brooks-rethink-robotic...

This isn't totally uncharted waters. There are similar robots/arms out there, cheaper even than Baxter's ~$20K price tag: http://www.universal-robots.com/

I think the semi-human factory robot is going to be a big robot segment eventually, and part of the path to robots moving around within society. Companies like Rethink Robotics end up working on necessary problems like how not to whack humans with giant robot arms, and make humans feel comfortable with the robots next to them.
Logged in as Russell91
Fri, 16 May 2014, 12:11

I assume this is just a snapshot?
Did you really notice that there is an image with a girl in it at the top of the post and still think that the author must be male?

My first association with Jules is male (the only Jules I know is a guy), but the image gave me second thoughts.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-translate/a...

Translate page button.
That's what regulatory agencies are, like the FCC and SEC. Anyone think they're the answer?
People in warm climates still have hot showers and need to dry their clothes on rainy days or at night. Or maybe they want to heat up their pool to use all year round. There's always a use for waste heat.
There are two Jamaicas, one for the tourists (the Beach) and the rest which is often quite poor and destitute. They mix as much as oil and water do, and the natives are "discouraged" from interacting with the tourists other than in a service role.

This is from personal experience and from extensive contact with Jamaican service employees working in the US (worked for several months with imported hotel staff from Jamaica when I was younger). These were some of the hardest working folks I have ever met, working two or three jobs at the five-star hotel we were employed at and saving up every single bit they could before returning to Jamaica where their opportunities were even less.
It was definitely soul crushing the first 100 times. The UK is particularly critical. I've gotten used to seeing "dull, rubbish, pretentious, scam" from UK reviews. Still stings just a little bit though.
Model airplanes are a hobby. I don't want to know a man who dosen't have a hobby. I don't mind if a person uses food as
a hobby. My dad didn't have any hobbies besides work. When
he retired he was lost. Godbless you Dad--I know you had a
tough life. I did love you. I wish we were closer. I tried, but we were just different people with different values. Happy Father's Day to all of you!
It's really a shame the author doesn't credit Tom Slee, who's done a lot of really great digging into Airbnb's numbers and their claims.
There are 2 possibilities:

1. People aren't tipping
2. Cab drivers aren't reporting their tips.

Being a native new yorker, legality aside, I'd bet most cash tips go unreported. Reporting a tip makes that tip taxable, so there is a very strong incentive to bury it if they think they can avoid trouble or suspicion.
Isn't it a cognitively-demanding task to create a new product, or to start a new company?
I've been using it for the exact same thing. One difficulty that I had was that you need to use the raw option, "jq -r" for string output without quotes, but I was looking at the query language documentation and not finding it.

EDIT: here is one I used. Given VOLUME_ID, gets the most recent snapshot-id.

SNAPSHOT_ID=$(\
aws ec2 describe-snapshots --owner-ids xxxxxxxxxxxx --output json |
jq -r "
.Snapshots | sort_by(.StartTime) | reverse[] |
select(.VolumeId==\"$VOLUME_ID\" and .State==\"completed\") |
.SnapshotId
")

EDIT2: now that I'm looking at it, I think that I expected it to work with multiple snapshots but I'm not sure that I tested it.
And in the UK after enough IRA bombs in wastebins.
Why is it a when, not an if? It would hurt their ongoing profits so much to do it.

But to answer when, I'd say probably after getting at least 60 percent of the network to control it comfortably without instability and slowdowns.
Wayland 3D Compositor with Oculus Rift and Razer Hydra [video]
There were many analytic saying it will end like this (I don't have links at the moment).

If you think about it, it makes perfect sense. Dethroning Saddam just led to a power vacuum that installed whatever he was suppressing for the duration of his reign.
In Tokyo, I do very occasionally see people eating while walking or even inside a train. It's probably more common now simply because there are more take-out possibilities, e.g. take-out from Starbucks. There seems to be less stigma now.

The article paints a little bit of a rosy picture regarding people and their trash. I do often take home my trash so that it can be properly disposed of (the city picks up different kinds of trash on different days, for proper disposal or recycling), but I do this somewhat reluctantly. Who wants to carry around trash? And sometimes, if I'm lazy, I put the trash into the outside trash bins of whatever convenience store happens to be nearby. In fact, I think the now ubiquitous presence of convenience stores goes a long way to explain why there are very few public trash cans.

While most people here do not litter, there is a small percentage who do, either regularly or because they're drunk and have lost their sense of social responsibility. But there's always a group of volunteers (often senior citizens) who clean things up every morning. Also, the well-heeled routes are often in front of stores or restaurants, and it's not surprising that someone will be cleaning up in front.

But overall, there is very little littering.
The Disappearing Universe
What really surprises me is that by this graph it really seems APNIC is better rationing its allocation the most of the other RIRs with it projecting still having small numbers of IPs available for crossover after 2020.

Part of this is that APNIC have limited all new applicants to a /22 when they hit a final /8 available. Existing registrants were offered an ADDITIONAL /22 as their final allocation, and due to successful hand-back of unused space, an additional /22 allocation is available for existing registrants.

It seems to ensure that small players (such as startups) can still enter the market and build a viable product without having to worry about it until they are using more the 1024 IPs.
It looks like it's just a hard save of the problems page.
The REAL way to benchmark your Web Hosting Service
Most cuisines are ethnic and you can point to a spot on the map, like italy. MG and modernist is more like "point to the internet".

Given that, by analogy, for most people "italian night" is ordering dominos pizza. However, it is possible to make a homemade tomato sauce and pour it on homemade fresh pasta made into the shape of homemade ravioli thats stuffed with home made home ground italian sausage. Most people would be surprised / shocked at that effort. That doesn't mean the homemade ravioli is less Italian than ordering Dominos or Dominos is more real because more people "cook" Italian that way.

So yeah, I've spent 5 hours making carrot soup. An entire afternoon. And it was really good.
But IP addresses aren't really fungible, are they? What's the smallest block you could actually transfer to someone in another part of the world?
'its all-but-stated goal of penetrating the lower-income market in the developing world'

This is where the fiction lies. You actually don't know what the goal was, but with a statement like this you can manufacture one that hasn't been met.

I think the 5C is part of a strategy that will ultimately allow Apple to address a larger market, but the goal of the 5C was not to cause that to occur immediately, but rather to conservatively introduce a second iPhone without destabilizing the whole product line.

If you consider the number of elements needed to make that happen: new design, new manufacturing, carrier agreements, marketing, etc, the goal here was to establish this second apparatus in a controlled manner. This is why the 5c internals are essentially the same as the 5 - i.e. the engineering element of the strategy is unchanged from before.

The 5c is the beginning point of the strategy, not the end.

The only people who think that the 5c was a disappointment, are those who think slashing prices is a 'strategy'.
(No, I'm not the author.)

Code: https://github.com/evil0sheep/qtwayland-motorcar-compositor

Thesis: https://github.com/evil0sheep/MastersThesis/raw/master/thesi...

Defense Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1svgGMxxbfmcHy_KuS5Q9...
> "Surely that responsibility is the host's."

So are good quality photos in order to get bookings. Yet Airbnb will make an effort to send a proper photographer around.

https://www.airbnb.com/info/photography
actually, there's a pretty strong push to get women into AEC (architecture, engineering, and construction) fields.
http://www.new-nyc.org/pages/become.html
http://www.pwcusa.org/
http://www.nawic.org/nawic/default.asp
http://www.wcoeusa.org/
Taste is far from the only consideration in the sensualist approach to food. As just one counter-example, texture is a very big deal, and something with which the folks into molecular gastronomy do some very interesting things.
There's a Mathematica worksheet which demonstrates that stock market returns (DJIA) are highly sensitive to start date / policy effect delay assumptions:

http://www.demonstrations.wolfram.com/StockMarketReturnsByPa...

It's not proof that you would observe a similar effect in this data, but it's enough for me to put no stock in any speculation of this sort that doesn't come with a sensitivity analysis :)
It's amazing how many business opportunities there are in finding ways to circumvent restrictive regulations.

It's almost as if regulations stop people from doing what they want to do and usually only serve a narrow few.

Yet year after year, politicians campaign vigorously for re-election by talking about how many new regulations they have written. And anyone who stands up and suggests that maybe a bit of deregulation might be a good idea is branded as someone who is inevitably 'a danger to children/way of life/jobs/etc'

So we have a situation where people gladly partake of services which innovate around regulations (usually because it relieves the consumer of the cost of those regulations) yet feel the need to keep returning politicians who promise to create more regulations.

The only explanation I have is that most voters think the cost-burden of regulations will always fall on another voter, and that the benefits will flow to them.
The data shows this trend is not unique to the US. http://economics.mit.edu/files/5554 page 17.
I'm of two minds about this. On one hand, laws are the product of many years of accumulated experience, and wantonly tearing them down means you will probably eventually hit the exact same issues that necessitated the law's formation in the first place.

On the other, laws grow by accretion, they exist within a historical context, and they are virtually impossible to get rid of once they have outgrown that historical context. Pretty much the only way to get a law off the books is to intentionally break it and then build enough popular support during the ensuing test case that you can either get a court to strike it down or a lawmaker to introduce a bill to repeal it. So people who break these laws are sometimes (not always) performing an essential service by forcing society to re-examine the rules it governs itself by and determining whether they still serve the public interest. And you don't know whether they're heroes (think Rosa Parks, the Boston Tea Party, or Sony Betamax) or demons (think Napster or the Unabomber) until public opinion comes down one way or the other.

It's also interesting how people's reaction to this seems to illustrate Lawrence Kohlberg's Stages of Moral Reasoning quite sharply:

Stage 1 (avoiding punishment): "AirBnB is fine because it's very unlikely that people will get caught or prosecuted" or "I won't use AirBnB because I'm afraid of getting sued or fined."

Stage 2 (self-interest): "AirBnB is a good thing because it lets me rent out a resource I already have and make extra cash."

Stage 3 (social approval): "AirBnB is fine because all my friends use it."

Stage 4 (law & order): "AirBnB is a plague upon this earth because their business model involves nothing more than systematically breaking laws and profiting from it."

Stage 5 (contracts): "People have a right to freely enter into contracts to mutually benefit themselves. AirBnB facilitates these contracts, and therefore is beneficial to society. It is the individual's responsibility to respect contracts they have already entered into with other parties."

Stage 6 (justice & universal moral principles): "If I were a host, I would appreciate being able to make extra cash by renting out my place. If I were a guest, I would appreciate the extra housing options. However, if I were a neighbor of a host, I would not appreciate the extra foot traffic and possibilities for damage or altercations. In many cases in today's economy, hosts are strapped for cash, and AirBnB may be their sole source of income. A host's right to make a living and not starve outweighs a neighbor's right to peace and quiet, and so the right choice is to legalize AirBnB but with regulations that can protect the rights of neighbors to the greatest extent possible."
Legally, they have every right to do this. This clone doesn't bother me because it's free and looks like it doesn't monetize on ads either (they just PhoneGap'ed the game and made it playable on touch devices). There is a serious gray area now with regards to ADR's trademark and brand (and developers taking advantage of the open source version/brand for personal gain).

EDIT: welp. it looks like he has ads.... :-(
Anatomy of a startup pivot: lessons learned from our radical change in direction
Fair enough. I should have said "what we could theorethically do" rather than "what we can do".
Five years ago is a bit long for software tools.
Run Docker on Mesosphere
This is an extremely poorly thought out article. The core idea, that you can't be the best at something and still fail, is so naive that it ruins everything else that the guy says.
Careful comrade, you're bordering on crimethink there. Why, next you'll be reading unsanitized research papers! Be on the right side of history, comrade.
I guess what I meant was there any "heroku" like platforms that offer mirage. I've been kicking the idea around for a while (I think unikernel is the future of PaaS/SaaS/Cloud) and wondering what the field looks like. :)
Objective-C is a great language; at least a lot of us who have been developing in it for years think so. We're excited about Swift because although ObjC has modernized a great deal, there are limitations to how far it can be pushed. Swift's clean block syntax is a good example here. Objective-C, if you're not turned off by the syntax, can be a joy to program in.
If fewer people got philosophy degrees or other majors of questionable utility in the work force and instead focused on getting an education in marketable skills with job openings maybe the story might be different. This trajectory of being an undecided major and then just kind of getting some degree or other with the hopes just having that paper will land you a job somewhere never struck me as realistic.

For the United States, there is even a site where you can help plan your next ten years, find something that's high growth:

http://www.bls.gov/ooh/

You can sort occupations by projected growth rate:

http://www.bls.gov/ooh/occupation-finder.htm?pay=&education=...