skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In Vancouver, you have a license for a cab (not a driver), and you can put any qualifying driver in that cab. Fire a driver, get a new one, you can still have a cab on the road, but they're not transferable (and they're limited in quantity).

That said, Vancouver's taxi system is a little wonky, though possibly not atypical; there are usually three parties involved: the driver, the person who owns the vehicle, and the person who owns the license (i.e. the cab company), and drivers who don't own their own vehicle typically have to split their profits three ways. More commonly, you pay X dollars per night (split among the two others) and then hope that you make enough fares to make a profit.

Which you usually do, of course. Part of the reason is because the city limits the number of licenses that can be issued; the other part is by crushing competition like Uber under old, outdated laws and regulations (in BC, Uber's black car service falls under the criteria of 'limo', and limos have a minimum charge of ~$65). Which kind of makes sense; if Uber started killing the cab companies, it would be the drivers who would suffer first, and not the companies themselves.
Succeeding in the startup world is luck like succeeding in poker is luck. Sure, there is an element of luck undeniably involved, but in the long term, raw talent should play a significant role as well.
Liquor laws.... cigarette laws (who can sell/etc.... and even auto sales.

Heavily regulated industries abound, those are three very big ones whose taxes fund a lot of services but more importantly whose political donations fund even more protection.

In Georgia there was a big stink about restaurants storing customer alcohol, seems the locals took offense and were confiscating private alcohol because of lack of tax stamps.

If people ever thought there were not enough taxes they never bothered to add them all up. Even taxes, fees, and whatnot, that do not hit you directly get you in the end
Is this actually true? I know it's definitely not true if a million people are rolling dice forever -- each die should land on 1-6 with equal frequency.

Given a limited number of rolls, though; say, 20 rolls per person; is there actually a consistent, measurable percentage of people that will outperform others? Somehow I doubt it.
The major cost of these sorts of kits is the development environment.

Arduino is great because their tools are all free. Atmel Studio is free, and built on top of GCC. Atmel even offers free software tools for their line of FPGA-AVR chips.

http://www.atmel.com/tools/fpgaintegrateddevelopmentsystems_...

What is the Total-Cost-of-Ownership of PSoC? How much do the software devkits cost?
I the current patent landscape, Microsoft is not expected to do anything but maximize it's strategic advantage and milk every possible loophole that can improve it's bottom line.

In the fantasy world of "patents protecting innovation", it seems rather dubious that The Inventor should actually obscure the details of his invention under incomprehensible legalese and vague threats with litigation. Quite the contrary, we should expect The Inventor to widely disclose and promote his intellectual product, so that manufacturers find out a Better Way to do it has been Invented, and it's available for licensing.

Could it be that (gasp) the whole premise of the patent system is flawed, that the vast majority of patented methods are trivial, obvious and sometimes unavoidable by the practitioner, and that the benefits companies derive from patents are anticompetitive as opposed to stimulative for research and development ?
The same happens to all areas with bars were night life is concentrated, whether there's taxi present or not.

There are completely similar places were ("drunk bar clientele from outside the area makes it difficult to live in") without any taxis (e.g in Amsterdam or Barcelona). Or places where the drunks prefer to drive (don't ask). In a dense city people can just walk there from a different area, or use the metro.
Hi Pete,

I can't get the video to work on my machine.

When opening it with the default video player I get:

An error occurred
This file contains no playable streams.

System info:

♥ uname -a
Linux yolobookjr 3.8.0-35-generic #50-Ubuntu SMP Tue Dec 3 01:24:59 UTC 2013 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Looks like a lot of software still has room to improve. :)
Virtual Reality Fan
>'Whereas the American one seems incapable of delivering anything with less than a 6-month waiting list..'

My family was on a wait list for housing assistance from the time I was a child until I dropped out of school and started working, making us ineligible. The list is currently closed and was last open over half a decade ago, for less than two weeks - like something out of a fantasy novel.

>...with an extremely bureaucratic and unfriendly process almost always serving as the gatekeeper.'

Well, there's a popular notion in the US that the process should be as difficult and unfriendly as possible - that people seeking public assistance are not just lazy, but living well. The 'welfare queen' [1] still haunts the system 40 years later.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_queen
Ok, but large corporations are supposed to be able to avoid human centric mistakes

They are not supposed to be worse?
This kind of comment is what keeps me coming back to Hacker News. I didn't know that Lemaître had proposed that the expansion was accelerating -- actually, I didn't know much about Lemaître at all, truth be told. ( The Day Without Yesterday just went on my reading list -- thanks!). In any case, I guess Stapledon must have been working off of Lemaître's model, rather than cooking up something unique.

Still, like you, I do like to imagine that Stapledon tapped into something that was somehow beyond the ordinary. I don't feel like speculating beyond that, but however he did it, Star Maker is an extraordinary book.
Some of his reasons for why he writes seem to be the same as why I work on software. I love this. I've been in a slump for months where I've lacked inspiration to work on anything. Maybe realizing that doing things for attention might be an acceptable reason to work on something if something good comes out of it might remove some roadblocks for me.
If you're worried about the possibility of "look-alikes" you probably need an expensive security team or possibly even actual law enforcement.
The reason they're limited in Vancouver (as an example) is because the structure is divided three ways; the cab companies (e.g. Yellow Cab, Black Top Cabs, etc.), the vehicle owner, and the driver (though some few drivers own their vehicles).

Drivers pay a fixed/minimum amount to the vehicle owner and the cab companies, and then they drive around to get as many fares as they can so that they can make sure to make enough to cover their costs, after which they start making a profit.

With more cabs on the road, there are more fares to go around, which means that drivers have to split the same number of fares over a larger pool of drivers, which means the entire industry gets poorer; everyone makes more money except the drivers, who need to start being more aggressive, cutting corners, cheating, ignoring regulations, etc. just to make a living. No one wants that.
Because this article is highly cited, and because you strike me as a personality who would appreciate micro-detail feedback: there is a typo ("algoritms") in the first sentence that immediately threw off my attention from an otherwise quite interesting piece of writing.

This is offered with respect and not a desire to nitpick. I hope it doesn't come across as annoying :)
Thanks for your video reproducing the bug. We'll get on it.

We don't expect to have something as polished as React yet. Early feedback is all we can hope for so we can iterate on what we believe is an innovative approach to a problem that many devs have.
Most startup folks don't believe this because it would mean they aren't the special snowflakes they think they are.
Tax/fine the bars?
I suspect you might not be paying enough attention to the issue.
Some people are wondering (here and on the previous post) how this problem could have escaped usability testing. My guess is, Gabe seems to have a somewhat unusual grip, so it's more than plausible nobody anticipated this problem. I am not a professional artist, but I've been drawing for more than two decades now. I also have an original Surface Pro because I really wanted to get my hands on a Wacom that could do more than just draw. I've churned out tons of sketches on it using Sketchbook Express.

When his first review of the Pro 3 came out, I could not understand why he had problems with the home button. When I draw, my palm tends to rest on the lower right corner of the screen. This is also how I've seen most other sketchers draw. I could not position myself such that I'd hit where the home button on the Pro 3 is.

However, I've also seen enough people write with really (to me) weird grips. I imagine that it extends to drawing as well.
And in the Haskell-Inspired department, we also have Idris:

http://www.idris-lang.org/

I read something about getting Idris to emit RTL, but unfortunately, I
can't find a link to it.

Of course, synflow.com wants to promote it's own "C~" language (I
haven't looked at C~ yet, so I've got no opinion on it).

Calling the blog post a "strawman" is a bit too harsh. Instead, I'd call
it "simplistic" or a "simple example" of the well known issues with the
more "commonly used" general purpose languages --As much as we love
Haskell, its use is far less prevalent than C or C++. The blog post
would have been much better if it went into more detail on the more
difficult issues of parallelism.
This is gold, thanks for the submission.

The biggest part is made by the great kriskowal, which gave us Q.js. Warranty of quality, if I may say.
The dev environment is free (although it looks like it is windows only). http://www.cypress.com/psoccreator/
Select2 3.5.0 released
I guess I meant to compare concerns about the Bay Bridge with concerns over whether SFPD or OPD has IMSI catchers (or drones), rather than over whether any law enforcement agency anywhere has them.

A very significant fraction of public records requests relate to something that the requester is concerned about or objects to or fears is being mishandled in some way. Deciding where to focus one's concerns and questions could be viewed as ideological, or at least ideological concerns help make particular topics more salient and interesting to people.

By way of analogy, take a look at the series of questions that these journalists decide to pose to Victoria Nuland, then spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of State, about the activities of European election observers in Texas during the 2012 elections there:

http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/2012/10/199824.htm

Obviously journalists have the right to ask Ms. Nuland about anything that interests them, and supporting that right isn't (very) ideological (within the U.S. political context). But it seems pretty clear that the line of questioning that they were pursuing was inspired by a concern or belief that Ms. Nuland herself didn't share: that there was something improper or disturbing about European international institutions observing an election in Texas.

If you share that belief, you might find the questioning pretty natural and obvious and even wish that it had been pursued a bit further and uncovered more information about the relationship between the U.S. and OSCE. If you don't share that belief, you might find the questioning perplexing or annoying, and be bewildered that the journalists didn't accept Ms. Nuland's perfectly reasonable replies.
For a capitalist and (relative to most of Western Europe) a centre/right country, the US sure has a lot of anti-business laws.
If you read my answerer you've replied to, you'll see that I disagree: the economic game of musical chairs will always corrode social progress and cohesion, see the Depression, neoclasical reforms of the 80s etc. Poor people (and their parents) can't afford to be anything but individualistic.
THE DISRUPTION MACHINE What the gospel of innovation gets wrong.
Sure, but if you run your own server, then the site's claim that there was "no download or install needed" doesn't apply to you.

If you don't run your own server, the site's claim that "nobody, not even us, can read or listen into your conversations" doesn't apply to you.

There's nobody to whom both claims apply at the same time!
What a shame that file wasn't posted :-/
To be clear I'm not at all against what you guys are doing. It's more about the messaging than anything else -- there are plenty of open-source projects that this could be said about, but the messaging is a lot less aggro than what I saw on Hamlet.
Whatever are you complaining about? Little as I am a fan of the WYSIWYG philosophy, Office is a genuinely spectacular product.
As Robotics Advances, Worries of Killer Robots Rise
The developers were probably using non-final hardware and/or sharing engineering samples if they had samples at all rather than developing drivers to the datasheet. By the time the marketing team got their hands on them the advertising may be booked and pre-orders received from retailers (if they ever actually get their hands on products rather than just arranging final mock ups or production trial run results shipment for photo-shoots etc.).

QA should have had a short window to study this type of issue but is it something that they would delay shipment over?

Basically I would expect the product to ship on schedule unless there was a really critical problem and that there wouldn't be slack in the schedule for weeks of refinement. Component orders may be place 6 months ahead to secure supply so it is hard to flex the schedule without causing inventory problems not to mention messing customers about.

Based on my experience in a CE company that wasn't Microsoft.
Thanks for your quick response.

In that case, it looks like a pretty good deal. Not all chip-manufacturers are willing to give free tools for some reason.

Other companies have digital logic packaged chips... but this is one of the first times I've seen programmable Op-Amps on a cheap SoC.
> Of course, when a 9-figure exit happens to someone who can't code as good as you and didn't go to as good a school as you–then it was most definitely luck.

Or maybe s/he had a better idea than you had? Doesn't look like luck to me.
IE11 is supported on Windows 7 and 8.1, but not Windows 8.0. So on 8.0 the auto-update feature is ineffective. According to StatCounter only 5% of 8.0 users have updated to 8.1. There must be something blocking people there, not sure what it is, but end result is the auto-updater doesn't actually auto-update everyone and fragmentation gets worse.
+1, really has no comments, completely agree, down vote at will...
A complete misunderstanding of the nature of disruption and a patently false statement that disruption is about the past and an post hoc justification.

Disruption is about providing a better product in the market in the midst of legacy producers who have become slow and indifferent due to their success. We see it every day with thousands of startups and legacy companies alike; google, apple, uber, tesla, and many more. It didn't start with The Innovators Dilemma and the author doesn't define it, mere he observed some of its properties.

This seems to be the type of nostalgic meandering that's used often in the publishing industry to justify its value of legacy aesthetic over innovation.
Ah yes, the old 'clap your hands if you believe' trope[1].

[1] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ClapYourHandsIfYo...
We are hackers, and for those of us with whom this article resonates, we can connect those with time but little money (e.g. teenagers looking for charities to contribute to) with the poor through technology. The teens could help with chores, maintenance, errands, filling out forms. Taking some of the time-pressure off might help them to get out of the cycle.

I'm willing to build it if you are. Contact me.
I don't think I've articulated it above, but there must be some way of separating out the police work that punishes actions that have clear negative consequences (murder, theft, etc) from the police work that punishes actions that tend to lead to negative consequences (said checkpoints).
I used VHDL for a semester back in 98 or 99 for my ECE degree. I remember it being extraordinarily brittle compared to something like C, because there were so many ways to trigger unreliability with the wrong clock edges etc. So for example we did almost everything as state machines instead of math. The code was basically unmaintainable by today's standards but was an important learning tool. As I recall, we wrote a VGA signal generator, and if you had less than half a dozen incorrect pixels onscreen, you were doing pretty well. So in fairness, I USED to know this stuff in nauseating detail.
send me an email (in profile) and I'll ship one out!
Office, like Excel, was mostly complete years ago. The iterations on file format and ribbon bar? Not so useful for most users.
I see the bug too on Chrome 35 on a Mac.

That said, and with lots of respect for your work on React Pete, and also acknowledging that React is probably the simplest of the big frameworks, the love of minimalism and simplicity comes from a very real need and attempts to fulfill that need shouldn't be dismissed as toy projects. From what I can tell, Mithril, for example, is anything but that.

I think people really really like being able to jump into something that can be useful and played with based on a few examples, and to model things with POJOs. I agree correctness shouldn't be sacrificed, but it doesn't have to be.
Comparing your CoffeeScript example against a vanilla JS React example seems cheap. here's the front page React example in CS:

converter = new Showdown.converter()

MarkdownEditor = React.createClass
getInitialState: () -> value: 'Type some *markdown* here!'
handleChange: (e) -> @setState(value: e.target.value)
render: () ->
d = React.DOM
d.div(
d.h3(null, 'Input'),
d.textarea(onChange: @handleChange, value: @state.value),
d.h3(null, 'Output'),
d.div(dangerouslySetInnerHTML: __html: converter.makeHtml(@state.value))
)

React.renderComponent MarkdownEditor(), document.querySelector('.container')

Showing a LOC comparison (and not even from the same dialect of a language) isn't a good proof for what you're trying to demonstrate. Clarity, simplicity, and debuggability all count. Removing a few extra lines of (non-boilerplate) code compared to React doesn't make the library simpler to work with.
I'm not even a serious artist--I'm a programmer who makes games--and the only reason I bought an SP2 was Photoshop.

I took it back because the SP3 news dropped that week.

Kind of regretting that now.
> We'll make the assumption that there exists a system than can transform any simple program

But then

> Before you answer, note that including a class from the STL means that behind the scenes your program actually includes a huge bunch of code.

Either your sample hardware translation can handle STL natively or you do not have a simple program.

> a dynamic memory allocator, a virtual memory system (or dozens of gigabytes of RAM, just in case), and a very complex Finite State Machine to implement the behavior of all the methods that are called directly and indirectly (so this includes methods from "list", "reverse_iterator", "allocator", etc.)

Assuming you are allowing the full powered standard STL library. You could provide a simplified one that avoided a lot of those problems (for instance having a maximum size of 256 and having some different underlying guarentees about time).

It seems the only point made is that no program could possibly take an arbitrary program and create an efficient hardware implementation of it. And I don't think anyone thinks that is possible.
This is true as long as your definition of "better idea" is the one that goes on to have a larger exit. That doesn't mean that luck wasn't involved in getting there.
Ask HN: what is the best backup solution for cloud servers?
This is not regulation is killing innovation in that space.
Fair I suppose - but I still think it doesn't contradict my point. I believe that what we need is a general (and smart!) enough language, along with advanced enough and intelligent enough back ends, which should solve the problem. It will obviously take a while, but it's a really quite large area of research at the moment!
One of the fundamental problems in American society is the failure to recognize that hard work is a necessary but not sufficient condition for big success. Yes, you do need to work hard, and do a hundred other things right, but even then, it still may not be enough to really make that big break. So yes, you need to analyze your customer data, have a great idea, smart people, and so on, but it may still not be enough, and there's no way to really predict which startup amongst the many hitting the necessary conditions for success will actually go on to be an apple or a google. That's the point that Adams is making here. (And I kinda hate agreeing with Scott Adams, but on this one, I do.)

When you realize that you have this kind of a system, you want to put in place institutions which underwrite failures, to allow your talented people the ability to try out big ideas that might be the next big winner. Such systems are hard (but not impossible) to put in place: There's a good argument to be made that academia is at its core one huge such hedge, allowing talented people (good enough to get through the tenure process) a long-ish leash to try out new ideas in the hopes of developing something both novel and (every once in a while) exciting. The flip side is that you need a gatekeeper system of some sort to minimize parasites, and hopefully also to ensure diversity in your boys club.
I guess the fact that some people have successfully escaped from prison means that prisoners are really free, right?

Your reasoning is lousy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
That's a middlebrow dismissal - honestly for $35/hr do you really think the target market is political VIPs.

I've hosted plenty of club nights were the venue didn't have bouncers, so security was me and a pool cue. This service would be perfect for that scenario.
A dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6864024.
This has the potential to be huge, if they decide to tap into the vast knowledge-base that Microsoft Research has developed over the years. I would jump at the chance to use an original implementation of their research on Decision Forests.
If you are in San Francisco, come meet me, I'll be your friend ;)
No, not quickly, on the contrary, there's an inverse relationship:

"...the United States and United Kingdom had the lowest intergenerational vertical social mobility ..."

"...Studies have also found "a clear negative relationship" between income inequality and intergenerational mobility.[27] Countries with low levels of inequality such as Denmark, Norway and Finland had some of the greatest mobility, while the two countries with the high level of inequality -- Chile and Brazil—had some of the lowest mobility. A 2012 graph plotting the relationship between inequality and mobility in the United States and twelve other developed countries has been dubbed "The Great Gatsby Curve"[27][28][29]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility#Country_compari...

PEW report:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/12/selling-out-over-long-term-...

U. Bekerley.edu / NYTimes feature:
http://www.irle.berkeley.edu/features/20130726_upward_mobili...
I agree that haskell isn't smart enough, but I think it's a step in the right direction, in that a lot of constructs seem geared to abstracting away the details of how to perform certain computations, and more about describing what a computation should perform.
Is Klarna the new PayPal?