skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I generally agree, although it's not just the disparity in regulations, but that the disadvantages of not being a licensed taxi are fading.

(You probably know all of the below being in the UK but I thought I'd flesh it out for those overseas.)

Black taxi and minicab operators have been in competition for decades, with regulation finally coming to minicabs about 10 years ago, and an uneasy but mostly quiet co-existence since then.

This co-existence has been underlined by the difference in how minicabs and taxis work. Taxis can be flagged down in the street, taxis can use taxi lanes, taxis can use official taxi ranks at airports and train stations. Minicabs, at least within the M25, are restricted in this regard. They have to be pre-ordered and within perhaps 5 miles of Charing Cross, it's probably a lot easier to flag down a taxi. Minicabs tend to focus on account work, pre-booked airport runs, courier stuff, and suburban journeys.

The problem Uber and things like it introduce is that the friction involved in getting a minicab is almost wiped out. You still have to pre-book, but they have cars milling around everywhere, all trackable, with no surly operators to call. You almost get the taxi ordering experience but with minicab-level drivers and prices. As far as I understand it, the contention of taxi drivers in cities like San Francisco is not so different to this.

So I contend the problem is that "minicab style" services are significantly increasing in quality through things like Uber and even the apps minicab companies are themselves producing (such as Addison Lee's) and therefore taxis are losing many natural advantages.

Having worked in the minicab industry many moons ago, my personal opinion is that this is no bad thing, since minicabs have had a deservedly notorious reputation in the past, and I don't think taxis will die out because there's always going to be a "flag down" market.

What perhaps would redress the balance would be applying the congestion charge to minicabs to help maintain central London as a predominantly taxi zone, and enforcing a toll for minicab airport pickups. It's all about taking baby steps to maintain the uneasy balance that has so far worked for decades. (Or, alternatively, open the whole thing up, shake off 150 years of regulations, and have everyone on a level playing field.. but that won't go down well.)
I could very well have got it wrong but the way I understand it was that in a file system such as ext4, if a file is somehow corrupted in memory and written to disk you might not be able to recover from this and the file might become useless. However, with ZFS you would lose "all" your files in the file system. Again, I might have misunderstood.
No, I don't think so either. But that doesn't mean they should. Firstly, they might like driving their black cab a lot more than Uber's cars. I'm a big, big fan of the hackney carriage for the way it's designed specifically for carrying 5 passengers in this context.

Perhaps it would be nice to see Uber using hackney carriages, I dunno. At any rate, I agree that Uber should be a force for good here in improving the licensing regulations.

Personally I've always had good experiences with black cab drivers, and many times they've given me a discount. But I've also found the same thing with Uber drivers.
While I was reading about the daily emails, I couldn't help but think that the slow web was just marketing speak for their chosen technical infrastructure. Ie. they run a midnight CRON job that parses all the emails because that's easy/cheap.
Here is some brainstorming on use cases.

1. You can validate cron jobs and programmatically change or reject some of them. Or maybe just offer a small set of services as a cron job.

2. Once you have a security model you can expose this as a web service and offer cron jobs over the web.

3. You could extend this API to use different implementations of cron. Instead of calling the actual cron you could implement cron in Python or maybe use a cron web service.
Line charts overlayed are fine, but they struggle when you have many series or many time intervals. Not that they are much better, but they are better.
Using Rails 4.1 Secrets for Configuration
Those silver American Eagles make a great, almost magical from the child's perspective, alternative to the lame-o paper dollar under the pillow when your kid looses a tooth, but I would recommend working your way up to them as it gets a little expensive, especially if you have more than one toddler.
@basicallydan - related to your point about The Knowledge. Doesn't satnav make that test somewhat anachronistic now?
Feedly down??
In Bergamo's low-cost-airlines airport (Milan) there has been one of this for many years. I have never seen anyone using it though.
http://www1.salary.com/CT/New-London/Taxi-Driver-salary.html

Not exactly poor but paid like many other jobs in London which probably don't come with tips. Trouble is that the internet has just about surplanted 'The knowledge' and made it available to all.
EDIT: I misread, this is my response when thinking they wanted to go TO Heathrow

Well then, that's a perfect example of a situation where Uber would be more appropriate. Black Cab drivers are meant for quick journeys through London. Why should they go well out of their way? It's their business.

(although, there's no need for people to scream and swear at you)
Well, adding a monetary component into the mix would achieve two things:

1. HackerNews would have more resources to do maintenance and development on the site. Both of which are relatively necessary: There's a lot of low-hanging fruit.

2. It would create an incentive to improve the service and prevent downtime. Would they really put the site down for multiple hours during (European) office hours if they had quite a few paying customers?

Primarily, though, I think it boils down to the fact that Hacker News was originally run as a service towards the YC alumni, and that it serves that purpose very well as it is - and as a result, product development has stalled. The original author (PG, the product owner) is busy doing other things, and has employed other people to run the show.

Truth is, Hacker News has outgrown its original audience (YC alumni) and would be ready for some changes or improvements. Nothing major, because it's great as it is, but it could use some bug fixing, or maybe getting the HTML and CSS up to date, or a mobile version, finally fixing that stupid 'up' arrow... I could go on. I care about Hacker News, and I want it to improve and to be available permanently, and most certainly not be offline when I wake up and am ready for my 21st century equivalent of the morning newspaper. That's why I wrote that angry message, and that's why I'm offering to pay to help achieve that.
Maybe of interest for some of you: http://baby.pirthday.com/
8 days until the perfect creation date for your ultimate pi-baby (born 3/14/15).

Other essential services are: your age in pi (http://pirthday.com/) or seeing who has his pirthday today (http://happy.pirthday.com/).
Disclaimer: Logo has been created by a friend (@turboele), other stuff by me.
They've done that already: Hailo. Interesting story:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/23/taxi_rage/
Appears to be heavily inspired by Node.js Streams[1]. Would love this pattern to be copied to other languages aswell.

[1] https://github.com/substack/stream-handbook
"The judge opined that the search would take place only when the e-mails were opened and read"

That's a silly argument, because it's like saying I'm going to grab papers from your home, but I'm not searching your home because the papers will only be read back at the office.
Sadly, so far no company has been sued by EU for complying with american legal requests.

I think the motivation is somewhat along the lines that the company didn't have a choice in the matter. Personally I wish that didn't matter and that the privacy breaches would have been prosecuted - I can think of nothing that makes legislative changes faster than companies having to choose where to do business because it would not be possible to do business both in USA and EU.
"Just as well" in all factors? What's the audit trail for smartphone app? Can modifications to the app be detected, or the app replaced with a real-looking fake app which favors the driver? Might the driver have two smart phones, one with real app and another with a fake app, and choose one based on the likelihood of not being caught?

Those scenarios are much harder to pull off with a "bulky fixed function meter device" designed to be inspectable.
A $20 Weather Station
FROM heathrow.
Tools for Remote and Distributed Retrospectives
Taxi's in Dublin have been a problem for a long time especially for people with up the socioeconomic ladder. The quality of the vehicles can vary as well as the manner of the driver. Regulation states the vehicles have to be clean but the driver is welcome to wear whatever they like and they often wear tracksuits and often espouse racist views (especially against Nigerian taxi drivers) which undermines the perceived professionalism of the industry here.

Uber has really taken off here in part because the taxi industry wasn't catering to this need. I do believe Uber is following the rules because they aren't a taxi service. They can't pick up people who flag them down off the street. They really are just a very sophisticated private car service and shouldn't fall under taxi regulation. Since the credit card details are held by Uber it also ensures the passengers behave themselves unlike in normal taxis where drunk or rowdy people vomit or make a mess in the car putting the driver off the road for the night making the entire taxi service somewhat inefficient.
I'm from the UK and I earned £13.5k as a junior (at a very large multinational company), I was 21 and just out of university. I only broke £25k when I hit 29 years old. I consider myself to be a good developer.

The salaries in the US seem 'pie in the sky' to me.
>named Karen (not her real name)

Why don't you tell her real name and other info?
That appears to be a place in Connecticut, not the London under discussion here.
We used XFS at a VFX studio, circa '97.
It depends largely on the satnav. London is such a complex city with a lot of nooks and crannies that people don't really understand and that satnav may or may not know about. Black cab drivers are also privy to the experience of knowing what places are busy when, and why, which satnav tools often can do too but not necessarily to the same degree of accuracy as a black cab driver whose job is to think on their feet and react to changes in the environment based on what they know and what they observe.

With a minicab driver simply following instructions from a satnav, you might as well just have a self-driving car, which is no bad thing.

With a black cab driver using their knowledge and experience and eschewing the instructions from a system which wasn't designed specifically for London, you may have a more reliably fast journey.

Plus, they could even give tourists some interesting facts about the places they're driving through!
I have seen more than one of these "vending machines" in Dubai.

Interesting thing is that they constantly adjust the price of the gold bars as the price of gold fluctuates. I guess these machines need a permanent internet connection to receive the current gold price.

Who will be the first to do a MITM and adjust the price to 0.001? ;)
Obsession is unhealthy. Brushing your teeth twice a day is not. Some people struggle to get the basic important things done without reminders!

Also: Tracking weight is far from "obsession". If you need to lose (or gain) weight, tracking is one of the simplest and most effective things you can start doing. You can't improve what you aren't measuring!
(File-sharing)+(Communication)=Profit?
I actually like the sound of that idea.
>> why should teachers have more job security than anyone else?

> Because otherwise a number of them would get fired every time someone from the opposing party gets elected.

How would that work, exactly? It seems like on so many levels a bizarre result to expect, and in the rare case where you might expect it seems like it'd be a positive thing more often than not. Or even if it wasn't, there are SO many simpler ways to prevent that outcome than giving EVERY teacher tenure.

Do you expect a republican or democratic political candidate to make firing all the English teachers or PE teachers or music teachers of the other party their first priority when elected to the (nonpartisan) office of Superintendent or to the City Council? Surely not! Does French or Math instruction come in Democrat or Republican flavors? Of course not! You're only really worried about science and history, right? Can you justify offering tenure to ALL teachers on that basis?

On the flip side, what if some teachers are objectively really terrible, a candidate runs on a platform of "I will clean up the schools by getting rid of these bad teachers!", and the candidate gets elected on that platform because the voters agree with it. Why shouldn't those teachers be gotten rid of?
Not sure about the UK cabs way of work. But what stops them being a UBER cab driver as well? Isn't it a additional channel? Like in radio taxi can't they simple make themselves busy when they get UBER call so that the cab company does not assign them any additional pickup/drop?
How to colocate your first server at a datacenter
That's the silly part of the question. Basically Hume and others are saying that because we don't know every single little piece of information and because there is the possibility, however remote, of an unknown we can't be sure our conclusion is true.

So although we have seen evidence for it time and time again. Even though we have excluded countless of other possibilities Hume would still sit in the back row muttering "there COULD be a different explanation".

Like I said, silly.
There's been one at the Emirates Palace in Abu Dhabi for a while now...I have seen people using it.
I wasn't aware of Marimekko charts[1] (well, not by that name anyway) before reading your comment -- but are they commonly used with a time axis? In the examples in [1] they seem like a pretty straight forward visualization of volume?

Off the top of my head I can't think of an example where a time axis wouldn't normally be used to visualize variation over time...? Perhaps quarter earnings as contributing to yearly earnings?

[1] http://www.fusioncharts.com/chart-primers/marimekko-chart/?M...
US customers are "toxic" to many banks internationally, not just the Swiss, because the IRS claims authority to access a lot of data for the prevention of tax evasion that either makes US customers wildly inconvenient, or that is actually illegal for the banks to disclose to anyone but their own authorities (if that).
I am also from Spain, and this info is misleading:

1. 21% is VAT. You hourly rate must be always VAT excluded.

2. I suppose you are referring to the "cuota de autonomos". This is 330 euro/month. New freelancers can get a cut during the first 2 years (100 euro/month if I remember well)

3. Nope. If you are a freelancer, the "cuota" includes social security (this includes public health service, so you don´t need a private health insurance; and yes, public health system in Spain works really well most of the time)

4. Then, you have the actual tax for your work (IRPF). In every invoice you need to withhold 9% of the gross amount during the first 2 years, 21% afterwards. Every 3 months you need to file "modelo 130" (more or less equivalent to an additional 9% monthly withhold) and once a year the government will net all these amounts. Depending on your personal situation (married,kids,mortage,etc), you may get some money back.

Nevertheless, 5-7K/month seems pretty accurate for Barcelona.

Hope this helps
I've used a black cab from Heathrow to central London a few times, but I still find using the Heathrow express more convenient and cheaper. Later getting a cab in Paddington to anywhere in central London is a breeze... compared to the M4/A4 constant traffic jams.
30 years?! Good luck with that. Manual cars will be around for a long, long time.
In Linux circles, I'd say yes, it's pretty well known. It used to be my choice of DE, but takes a lot of tinkering and is not as feature complete as KDE is (which is a plus for others, I suspect).
Who cares if javascript execution is slower? You can speed that bit up by not allowing it to run in the first place. I would accept any speed of browser to avoid Australis.
Agreed. I was just summarizing to save you a long read :)
Oops, my bad - I misread. Sorry :)
This would be useful incase, if you want to set cron dynamically.Based on the executed result, next step can be manipulated via this.
> Uber's drivers are in a similar position.
Except that now they have to pay Uber as well.

Here's from their FAQ

"No - there is no cost to sign up with Uber, only a small commission taken on each completed trip."

I couldn't find the commission rates though; is it publicly available?
Deep-Watching Circular Data Structures in Angular
> As a side note I also dont think there is anything stopping a London black cab driver from signing up for Uber.

Uber just today announced black cabs as an option in London. I'm not really sure what I feel about this, there is very little differentiation between Hailo and Uber now.
More people have heard about Uber thanks to these strikes than they ever would have (for the time being anyway...)
Not only fossil+venti, the old standalone cached-worm file server, and its user-space port cwfs were also built around versioning.

By default, the cached-worm systems are dumped at 5am every day in the morning, meaning you can access your files as they were at 5am every day. You can manually dump them whenever you please, of course. These dumps are cheap, but not as cheap as fossil or ZFS (or git) snapshots. Unlike ZFS (not sure about git), these dumps are immutable, you can't delete them.

With fossil+venti, you still get daily dumps, but you also get finer grained ephemeral snapshots. By default at 15 minute intervals, I used to set them at 5 minutes. You can control how long you want to keep these in fossil, I kept mine for 3 months. The dumps are venti are immutable. These are very very cheap, and these systems also do deduplication, by default.

I don't run fossil anymore, I like the features, but reliability was less than stellar for some people, and the performance is much lower than cwfs, which is what I use now. Cwfs is very fast, rock solid, and very easy to recover in case of a catastrophe. I miss ephemeral snapshots, but cwfs dumps are cheap enough I can run them for what in a normal system you'd do "commits" for.

I miss all these features when I am forced to use Unix. Git does two things, history preservation and patch management. For history preservation, nothing beats the Plan 9 system. What git does better is patch management. I think it's valuable not to conflate these two concepts and create tools that can solve each one well, and work well together.
It's interesting how the tech start-up community suffers from the same inability to shift perspective that Microsoft had when it became a powerful megacorp but still saw itself as the underdog.

Uber is not the plucky little start-up going up against big, slow incumbent corporations, like many tech start-ups did in the past.

Uber is the heavily funded 800-pound gorilla going after the livelihoods of the little guy.

So yes, some taxi-markets could do with changes, but the heavy handed and callous approach of greed-driven "disruption" is totally out of place here. We're talking ordinary hard working cab drivers, not fat cats in the boardroom of MegaCorp.

If anybody wonders where the growing hate against the tech community comes from, they may want to start looking in the mirror.

There's a difference between arguing that innovative disruption may temporarily cause some pain and openly pissing on those who find themselves on the wrong side of that change. There is way too much of the latter going on here.
Social Shopping Marketplace Etoot Launches Today. It's Free
Indeed.

Madrid and Barcelona rates are up to 30% higher than in the rest of Spain. Cost of living is higher as well.

Then we have a second group: Valencia, Bilbao, Sevilla, Malaga with somehow higher rates.

And then the rest of Spain.
> when a smartphone app can do the job just as well?

Can it? GPS isn't to be relied upon, and a bad actor can mess with it pretty easily.
There is no point in this training and buying extra hardware. I don't believe that there should be any extra regulations for it, but to solve the problem you need political capital. Make it simple and fair to everybody. For licence pay x for month. For entering strict city centre, extra y.
You'd have to have quite a bit of inside info to do that & given hopefully the designers of the machine had enough forethought to not connect the thing to the open internet. To top that off they may even have programmed it to stop if the price variations get too crazy (99% drop may trigger it).
I have a feeling those sticks wouldn't stand up as well to the sort of load this use case would require of them.
Show HN: A Diceware password generator using random.org
In other news, the computer serving the article has evaporated due to overheating. By browser almost died.
This seems to have solved it for me, finally! Thanks a lot.
What are my rights at various “checkpoints”?
1. You can incorporate an LLC or Inc. from any part of the world. This won't be an issue.

2. The LLC or Inc. can get EIN and open USA Bank Account. You'll not have an SSN unless you have a valid work visa, students visa or your green card. Not a log of banks will help you open these kind of accounts unless you have someone with SSN to help you there. Most startup-friendly bank is SV Bank.

3. You won't be able to hire yourself unless the company is one year old and has certain revenue. Even when the company is eligible for everything else, it'll still have to file an H1-B which is more like lottery these days. 2014 quotas are already full and 2015 quotas will only open in April 2015.

4. and 5. Unless you have an H1-B or L1, you won't be able to move to the States for work.

There's something called EB-5 but that has substantial investment.
DOS on feedly
Who cares whether it's subpoena or warrant, thats not the point.
The point is, you can't compel international company to break law in another country, f. ex. suppose chinese court would order (subpoena?) microsoft to hand over emails and pictures of a known political dissident, that are kept on US server, what the hell do you expect microsoft do? comply? stop doing business in any country that has laws that conflict those of US? It's _very_ easy to imagine such scenarios, in all areas really, patent law, finance, whatever.
I think the only real solution is those MLATs, or international agreements on handing over data. Or maybe, in future, an international court, that could issue subpoenas valid in all member nations, when investigating crimes with similar enough laws in member nations.
ATM is a bit of a misnomer isn't it? Can you deposit gold into your "account" at the machine? If not then it's similar to any other sales kiosk (like the ones at the airport selling headphones)
"Me too"-ism? Are tutorials and articles on a new language only supposed to be written by one single person?

Or should any other who has written related material not inform HN, because someone other's articles were posted first?
CMake 3.0.0 Released
The US government don't seem to realize that this could equally well be used against them, for example another country where MS operates could file a warrant requiring that Microsoft handover US government files.
Tech cofounder needed – honestly worth your time
If wood becomes even more in demand, will we plant more trees then we kill? We humans are already destroying our forests as it is.