skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It isn't delusional to think otherwise. It is, however, very unlikely.

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-04-07/with-uber-ru...

$15 to $30 is not a practical delivery service.

I can get my whole shopping list from a grocery store delivered same-day for $10.

https://www.instacart.com/faq ? $4.

Uber has a very, very long way to go before they become a serious competitor in that space.
A very well thought out article.. however, of the future markets that the author dismissed, "moving services" does not look as unbelievable. (article says-- "Uber could extend its reach into other businesses such as car rentals, moving services and even driverless cars, but I don’t see evidence")

Ton of companies-- amazon, google, postmates, insta cart-- are looking for viable local logistics. And Uber can have a play in that; initial experiments in New York seemed encouraging.
President Obama Declares June 18th National Day of Making
Show HN: I'm 16 and created a Twitter bot to tweet World Cup Results
Hey HN!

My name is Moin Nadeem (@moinnadeem), I'm a 16 year old aspiring developer from Oklahoma. My initial thought was to create a webapp to text you with the World Cup results, since my cousin always had me look them up. However, since I don't have a credit card to hook into Twilio, I created a twitter bot instead.

It's using the World Cup API released yesterday, running on Node.js and using node-cron. Take a look!

@fifacupalert

https://twitter.com/fifacupalert
scoop uses mysql for its managed repository. we also use mongodb for our published repository that serves our apis to everybody else.
Twitter embraces GIF
Do you swing your head or phone about while you play video games? Why do you expect to?
IOS 8: Building custom simulators
Ask HN: What are you learning right now?
Intimidated by iPhone?
Amazon launches a shopping machine and calls it a phone
Amazon Fire Phone Developer Page
I made a similar argument in a prior comment. Particularly once driverless vehicles take off, the economics of vehicle ownership shift massively. Uber will be able to maximize utilization of vehicles and deliver them quickly due to coverage. The idea that network affect doesn't matter here is incredibly short sighted IMO.
If I were a manager at the mining company that purchased the drones, I would be worried about retaliation in kind by workers who obtained a similar drone.
Ouch exclusive to AT&T + $199, 2 year contract. Anyone think this is going to sell?
Working with CoffeeScript: Common Gotchas – The Artillery Blog
World cup on terminal
I created this simple npm command line tool to post latest scores and schedule from Fifa world cup 2014. It's based on world cup...in JSON http://worldcup.sfg.io/
It's not because they don't "dominate" in the area of building network hardware that they release their designs. It's because this is not what gives Facebook an advantage in the social products space.

There aren't better social networks out there that would thrive if only they had better network switches.
Upvoted for this comment:

Stress symptoms don't necessarily manifest themselves immediately. It might be something that happened long time ago (3 - 6 months) surfacing now. And when it is happening, you might not pay attention to it, you might be inclined to overlook. (citation needed)

Citation or not, this is something that people overlook constantly. Sometimes the resistance/fight or flight mechanisms in our brains will get us through truly awful stuff, only to start really being bothered by it months later when we have the free brain power to think about it.

Also worth noting, is that sometimes really GOOD life events can be stressful as well. Landing a new job, finding a new partner, etc., all of those things (or perhaps wanting to keep those new things in place) can also add onto the stress pile much more significantly than others see. The real kicker is that there just aren't very many people you can vent about it to or seek advice from when you're talking about how great everything is, and how much it bugs you. It's something I make a point to watch out for when I talk to friends and peers. Too many people seem to respond after the fact with "But things were going so well for him" without seeing how that can make things difficult for someone.
Wealth redistribution schemes utilizing a means test are qualitatively different from those that do not.
Docker Cloud with Apache Brooklyn – Clocker 0.4.0
Uber has recently made it irritatingly difficult to figure out what their rates are, so let's go with Lyft, which has very similar prices. Their SF rates are $1.35 per mile[1] -- assuming that you never have a waiting fee, never hit a minimum fare, and never pay during surge pricing (yes, yes, "prime time tips"), and, mysteriously, never pay their "safety" fee.

If you drive 7,000 miles a year (so, about 5,000 miles less than average), that's $9,450 dollars per year.

The TCO of a Honda Civic, assuming 15,000 miles a year (more than twice what we're assuming for the Lyft rider!) is on average a couple thousand dollars less per year [2].

Rideshare is not a reasonable substitute for car ownership for anyone who is cost-conscious, and it will never be until and unless autonomous vehicles exist.

[1] https://www.lyft.com/help?article=1263247
[2] http://www.edmunds.com/honda/civic/2014/tco.html?style=20049...
People Invested $1 Million In An App That Just Says ‘Yo’
Google, lets stop pretending we are talking about any other search engines, will learn in time to identify and penalize source of spammy links instead of recipients. Webmasters should be responsible only for the content they have control over.
A little over five years ago, when a whole lot of people were telling me that Javascript could do anything that Flash could do, whenever I brought up anything related to audio, I'd get silence. Writing something like http://www.audiotool.com/ to operate in the browser was just not possible without Flash (or maybe Java)

The continued envelope-pushing going on at Mozilla with regards to audio in the browser has been great to watch unfold. Part of what made the web browser so interesting to me was that I could easily build things in it using a text editor. I didn't need to buy a compiler or a textbook, because I could look at an interesting website and peek under the hood. It's been a gateway into other more complicated realms of software production for me, and it's exciting to see audio signal processing tools coming into the fold as well.
This is not finalized yet but something we want to support.
Did you perhaps mean to reference http://famo.us/?
Amazon FirePhone
Oh absolutely values before objects. I said "serializing" more in the sense that pickle is always used for storing the arguments into the queue (or whatever the default serializer).

It always depends on your use-case but generally you want your application to behave correctly, which means it has to have correct/fresh data...you can't sacrifice correctness because of an inability to scale your database.
That's a $1.5M investment up front. Maybe it will make you 10% more efficient, but I have to look at all of the different things I could spend $1.5M on. Hopefully there's something in there for a growing company with an expected IRR of more than 10% over 18 months.

In parallel, how many months of runway do you have? I'm guessing it's not 18, much less the 36+ you'd want to really see those benefits pay off even if it were the most efficient use of the capital.
Pingdom is a good product and I've used it with moderate success.

However, sometimes I can't help but chuckle at the marketing and productization genius of someone who monetized the classic `ping`! Anyway, congratulations to the pingdom team on the acquisition and hope to see a more comprehensive API from them soon.
Next TopCoder match dedicated to HumbleFool with $5000 prize
His words where: "You are absolutely deluded, if not stupid, if you think that a worldwide collection of software engineers who can't write operating systems or applications without security holes, can then turn around and suddenly write virtualization layers without security holes." (http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=119318909016582)

It a wonderful quote by the way, I really like it and it mirrors my reservations regarding some peoples use of visualization.

Visualization is perfectly fine, for hardware utilization, ease of deployment and so on, just don't rely on it for additional security, because that's not what it's there for.
I've given up on valuing start ups. I've come to realize that I'm not that smart after I didn't agree with Facebooks valuation. These companies are worth whatever the market/people agree to pay for it. It doesn't have to make rational sense. I've accepted this, because I don't argue when someone wants to pay $10 million for a painting because it's the only copy that exists and is a thousand years old. So why argue when it comes to the value of a company determined by the market? If the owner insisted that his company is worth that much, we might have a disagreement, but with the market saying Uber is worth $17 billion? $17 billion it is.
They probably get ads and displays in the retail stores. I think it'd be hard to launch a new phone brand without a retail presences even for Amazon.
> Do you think anyone who is ready and willing to use encryption on Windows is incapable of switching to linux?

Yes, because I know people who fit that exact profile. Just Friday I was talking to a person who had found TrueCrypt a few years ago and used it ever since, who wanted my help with what the dramatic website shutdown meant for them. "Just switch to Linux" certainly would not have gone over well.

The set of all people who (a) cannot afford Windows Ultimate (b) rely on Windows-only software and (c) want encryption is non-negligible.
I don't get it. Do we imagine organic chickens are roaming around town? Have the wide open prairie to explore? Of course its going to be an enclosed area.
This phone looks like it has some real innovations and unique design decisions:

-3D Screen

-Gesture Control

-Surround Sound Speakers + Prime Video

-Prime Data

-Firefly

-MayDay

Here is a quick breakdown:

The 3D screen is a pretty unique feature compared to the top-of-the-line offerings from the industry leaders. I saw a 3D screen on a phone at a party at CES and I was impressed by the quality and useful ness compared to 3D TV. 3D makes much more sense on a smaller size screen because you add more real-estate with the other dimension.

Another interesting feature is that the phone is designed for use with one hand. To achieve this, it uses integrated gesture control, for example, tilt the screen to get more information or to access menus.

The phone a scanning system called Firefly that can be activated by a button and is able to identify products from photos (100 million items) and barcodes. This will make the phone extra dangerous to retail stores that are already losing sales to "showrooming".

The phone also features dual dolby digital speakers (one on each side) for surround sound when watching horizontally. They are also providing access to Prime Video catalog and store for unlimited pictures via their cloud services.

They are focusing on customer service and help by providing the MayDay 24/7/365 tech support for the phone. It sounds like agents can do a sort of screen share with the phone and guide users along. This will help adoption by people who are typically not good with operating new technologies.

The phone seems pretty cool and unique and with Amazon's ability to market it directly to their customers, it is sure to do well.
Then why is everyone still paying for universal access, if the farmer is using a line installed in 1930? If it cost $10k to run that line in today's money, they're making out like bandits.
I think it'll do better than the Facebook HTC One, but I otherwise expect that it's going to seriously struggle. Even an uneducated consumer will rapidly realize that they don't have access to Google's apps, or Apple's apps, or even many common third-party apps that they're used to having, and the contract price puts it on par with an iPhone 5S/Samsung S5—i.e., it's got premium pricing, despite its inferior ecosystem.

That said, I have to admit that being able to give my parents a smart phone with 10-second delays to talk to a human is tempting. I've thought of giving them a Fire tablet for the same reason.
Which can then be accessible from your Play Listen app.
You are confusing “energy use” with “electricity use.” Things like natural gas heating (especially if you live somewhere with really cold winters), gasoline for ground transportation, and jet fuel for air travel, as well as all the different ways these inputs go into, e.g., growing the food we eat and manufacturing household items, form a very large part of the average person in a developed country’s energy use.
Here's a link to the Amazon detail page for the Fire Phone: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EOE0WKQ
Yet iF you want to save time then the only critical resource is your employees. 10% is an extremely low estimate of the disruption open-plan offices engender. In some cases they can completely disrupt some employees, resulting in 0 or negative return.
Fun fact: deregulation of the U.S. airline industry in the 1970's was a tremendous success, paving the way for companies like FedEx and UPS: http://www.aeaweb.org/annual_mtg_papers/2008/2008_264.pdf; http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/news/allrise/2009/01/30-years-after....

As for VOIP: the concerning thing there is the FCC's taxing of a content service that runs on the internet. I don't think that's a precedent most supporters of net neutrality want to embrace, but that's exactly the path you're going down with Title II.
They shouldn't cooperate with the carriers at all and fire some legal shots at the subsidy contracts. WP7,7.1,8 showed why cooperation is bad idea.

Bezos just don't have the money to compete with the big boys and should be looking at breaking the current model.
This is an important point. Further to that, Uber should be a company with very clearly understood ROI. They put X number of dollars into a new city and get Y number of users and make Z number of dollars over a few years. Because they've done this in dozens of cities, they've got these numbers down. From Uber's perspective, any money they raise should look as much like debt as possible. Why? Debt means existing shareholders won't be diluted. If a growth company can safely issue debt, it always will. Probably not realistic for Uber to issue 1.2B in straight debt today (interest on that would amount to roughly 20-40% of their current revenue), so they would seek as much of the economics of the raise to resemble debt as possible. The more it resembles debt, the less we learn from the headline numbers about implied valuation.
For a while my way to unwind after a rough day at work was to fire up GTA4, turn off the cell phone (to pause the story mode) and just drive around like a lunatic and blow stuff up. It's actually surprising just quite how effective this technique works to unwind.
Ethernet switches have used ASICs pretty much since forever.
Spotify works well if you set your most listened to stuff to be available offline.
Apache jClouds – The Java Multi-Cloud Toolkit
That's the point where I put my wallet back up.
Pitching for design work: just say no
Given that a successful pitch can lead to work resulting in many thousands of dollars of billable work, it’s no surprise that agencies invited to pitch will put a huge amount of effort into creating pitch materials, including a lengthy written proposal—often with a full cost breakdown—and lavish presentation material showing spec work.
I think Mozilla's Rust team was considering telemetry reports, not just for rustc compiler crashes, but also for syntax errors in user code. Knowing what kind of syntax errors are most common in user code could provide feedback for language design.
Interesting! B&W makes total sense. Low res also makes sense for head tracking but I guess that means pupil tracking is out of the question. Regarding low framerate, like lower than 30 fps? I would have thought continuous perspective shifting would require a framerate at or better than screen refresh rate to appear normal to the user.
Don't UPS, FedEx, USPS have much more talent and software already deployed.
Owning Cryptocurrency
It doesnt take a genius to realize that when you identified 1 million bad links to XXX, and your database has 1.005 links to XXX, you should look carefully at the remaining 5K. Cross reference those sources against other suspicious links and so on.

Basically fight source of bad links, not recipients.
Surprisingly high price, even on contract!
I was thinking they would pull another Prime tie-in (say $49 as long as you are on prime and do not cancel).

Also in this day and age, being AT&T exclusive is a real puzzler. What does Amazon hope to gain by this?

Jeff is usually lauded for his OOTB thinking but here we see all the hall marks of following the very beaten path...

Edit: And there it is! Includes a year of prime with the price of the phone (as revealed at the end)
Is this truly only an acquihire, or are they really looking into getting into the VPN business?
A background task is just something that's computed outside of the standard http request/response process. So it's asynchronous in the sense that the result will be computed sometime in the future, but you don't care when.

Distributed just means that you can have your task processing spread out across multiple machines.

A specific example would be, let's say, after your user registers on your website for the first time you wan't to get a list of all his facebook/twitter friends. This action will take a long time and is not vital to the whole registration/login process so you set a task to do that later, and let the user proceed to the site and not make him look at the spinner the whole time, and when the friend list becomes available it will show up on the website (on his profile or whatever). Makes sense?
Does this support DRM on the audio files?
I can't decide whether Amazon should be credited for trying out new things and pushing technology forward or criticized for their stupid attempts at locking you in to their infrastructure.

Fire TV was the same way. Cool device except that everything that wasn't Amazon was a second class citizen.
On the "How It Works" page, there's mention of installing a "Carlypso device"
on the vehicle:

http://www.carlypso.com/how-it-works/

> "2.We'll send an inspection mechanic, who also attaches our Carlypso device"

I also quickly searched the FAQ for "device":
http://www.carlypso.com/faqs/

I must have overlooked it but are there any details on what a "Carlypso device" actually is?
SF (Uber's most mature market) has grown 20%+ YOY from 2009 - 2014 based on some rough math:

"When we got this company started (in 2009) we were pitching the seed round and we pulled a bunch of research from this report that showed that San Francisco total spend on taxi and limo was like 120 million bucks. But we’re a very healthy multiple bigger than that right now, just Uber in SF. So it’s not about the market that exists, it’s about the market we’re creating." - Travis Kalanick

[1] http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/06/06/uber-ceo-travis-kalan...
That's like saying you shouldn't trust the police because a lot of police officers accept bribes. Even if it's true, the conclusion can hardly be that we should stop having the police.
$200 price point is silly for a device that seems to be fine-tuned to make you buy things. They should be selling it at a loss, not charging the same as an iPhone.
Nuclear Reactor Fits on a Semi and Cools Without External Power
It's a great idea, very useful. I don't see how you could have a business model, though. Think about adding other features as well, such as reviews.
DevOps means different things to different people.

most people use the term to mean 'a coder who can configure apache'

this whole incident reeks of a lack of OpSec and general Ops knowledge.

Lack of offsite backups is one thing, but if you're using cloud infrastructure you never place all eggs in one basket.

your instances have to be disposable and reproducible, at the first hint of a break in my default action is to torch and rebuild.
thank you. who cares about 3D lock screens if it's not even going to make it through a day on a single charge.

Look at all these amazing features....you will need to turn off in case you want to actually use this as a phone....
What does $27/month mean? Surely no one would pay $27/month instead of $199 up front.
Yeh, but how likely is it to payoff as much as they're hoping for organically? My guess is that's pretty close to zero, probability-wise. Which should tend to discourage such investment.

The only reason it isn't discouraged is because the behavior of crazy investment becomes its own semi-unintentional pump and dump scheme. The initial investors can strike it rich, even if Uber's not really worth $17 billion in the long run... just so long as the second-wave investors think that it's really worth $20-something billion.

Investment really isn't even investment anymore, so much as it is gambling
Sharp Introduces Free-Form Displays Making New Display Shapes Possible
I would have ordered it instantly at up to $199 carrier-free.

$199 with a 2-year ATT contract? Pfft. No way (and I'm a long-time Prime customer with a FireTV and multiple Kindles).
"which means future value, not current worth."

No it doesn't. The value is today. If it was some future value different from today's value, then someone would be arbitraging on the difference.

Maybe you are trying to say that the value today is based on future performance, which should be obvious.
I recently started on Zoloft, and despite how afraid I was of it and how many bad experiences I read online, it's been fantastic. Could you elaborate more on your experience?
New Emojis, But No Hot Dog
Exactly. The blatant cozy relationship between government and corporations, using lobbyists (aka, former civil servants) as a broker makes the regulators so ineffective as to be worthless.

Hell, the government can't even effectively regulate itself. Look at the NSA "oversight" for example. Ostensibly it is there to regulate the NSA. In fact the NSA simply refuses requests by the oversight committee and nothing happens.

At what point with the AT&T's just start saying no to regulator demands and get away with it? I suspect its already happening.
Not sure why they would only want to sell this in the US. This exclusive deal with ATT ruins any chance of this being successful in this age of contract free phones and the cheap Nexus line.
This isn't for grocery delivery, this is to compete with local couriers, and it's priced accordingly.

http://breakawaycourier.com/courier-delivery-rates/ quotes $12 minimum in Manhattan (compared to the $15 minimum of Uber's courier service in Manhattan) which is comparable in price. I suspect a bike messenger would be quicker than a car messenger in Manhattan, but that's conjecture.

My local grocery store can deliver inexpensively (or even for free) because they're making a hefty markup on my coffee and bottled water. Similarly, Instacart appears to add markup into the price of it's items: "Yes, Instacart prices are our own and vary from the store’s price" (from the site you quote.)

So, it seems that $15 to $30 could certainly be a practical delivery service.
Because I don't buy socks from Apple.
Why drones - invest in smart ground based flak cannon manufacturing.

If we can't fly -- we won't let anyone else either - old anti aircraft moto.
Free year of Prime included, worth $99.