skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reddit has the best content for any message style forum I've ever come across. The combination of user voting plus moderation works incredibly. And it's not just a few subreddits, it's a huge swath of them. They've attracted the best community of users that I've ever seen and that positive feedback loop of easy-to-use UI plus great username creates a fantastic site.

The top comment is usually useful no matter what the topic is, and I usually never leave disappointed when I read a thread I'm curious about.

It would be a shame if they ruined the site a la digg by trying to monetize too aggressively.
A user being able to give a negative review for a game not supporting language X when the game, like every single app in the app store, lists exactly what languages it supports on the download page devalues legitimate reviews and is the sign of a broken app review process.
It's not a definition from the "PR" - it's the fundamental interpretation of privacy as a social construct. You being a very private person means your desire to share your personally identifiable information (PII) with other human beings is very narrow. It has very little to do with the entity that facilitates that sharing (i.e. Facebook). Privacy concerns about Facebook is essentially concerns about how (some) Facebook employees will look at and use your data (including sharing it with third parties) without permission. Since I very much doubt Facebook (or any ad-supported Internet company for that matter) is letting that happen, I have always felt that privacy concerns with Facebook as a whole is kind of silly. What people usually express outrage against (including myself) is that Facebook facilitates easy inter-user consumption of information that often breach the basic notion of privacy for many users. One prime example of that is the opt-out of default public sharing of posts.
The analogy with license plate detection appears quite accurate.

At first glance this scheme appeared akin to gathering wifi MAC address broadcasts, but the picture of the box shown in the article has a Tx antenna co-ax connector (looks like SMA). Then there is the question of SIM authentication for service. I don't suppose the cops are going to provide 4G service for free (there is also the issue of service collision and spectrum allocation) so probably what happens is that the SIM data is handshaked using some duplex protocol (hence the need for Tx in the base station), but no connection is made.
Join with me let discuss about out of body experience
OK, but there's basically no way to know what those are.
Are you sure? One would expect that most new product launches or major sales would be linked to by users for free. Additionally, all the major vendors are already linked to in the sidebar wiki posts...
I'd add being a US citizen is starting is looking like a less and less attractive prospect.
I would bet on desalination becoming practical using solar power, before fusion is cheap enough to compete.

The day/night cycle isn't a problem for desalination because fresh water is easy to store, and the places that most need water tend not to be cloudy.

I think the killer app for fusion is large vehicles: cargo ships, spacecraft, helicopter islands, etc.
I think you forgot:

Step 1.5: Drop ethics.
I ask a lot of questions:
The Uber training, apparently, is that driver's should only ever rate their customers a 5, or a 1. That's it. A customer is either great and a 5, or an asshat and a 1.
> Am I guessing correctly that this isn't at all related to negative energy?

Yes.

> When calling this a temperature below 0K - isn't this shoehorning the concept of temperature onto something it wasn't meant to do?

No. Suppose you're doing a Fluid Dynamics Simulation. You need to assign a temperature and pressure to each point in space to simulate gas flows. Using the negative temperature will correctly predict the evolution of the gas flow.

This is actually a strength of physics, having equations that can take on values that to your knowledge are unphysical (such as negative refraction indices for example) but still work. This means that when someone manages to figure out how to build such a system; we don't need to rework all of our theorems (conservation of energy; momentum; etc) to see which are still valid. We also have the ability to investigate the applications of such materials; should we ever be able to find a way to create them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamaterial

> Isn't this transition from a positive temperature to a negative temperature system non continuous, as in it needs to be set up with different properties

There are plenty of discontinuous transitions in thermodynamics, phase diagrams are an example. This is hardly an argument to that the concept of negative temperature is a broken one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_diagram
The Workout: Practicing his own medicine
I somehow have a 4, the lowest in this thread (that I've seen so far). I wonder what I did, I generally try to be polite to the drivers and I rarely use the service, so I suspect I got one extremely poor rating? I can't imagine when though.

Anyway, looks like you can go and pull the token out of the page and just do

curl https://m.uber.com/cn --data '{"messageType":"PingClient","token":"xxxxx","app":"client"}' | jq .client.ratin

to check it programmatically. Could be interesting to have a service detect somehow that you'd just finished a ride and show you the new score (and possibly the change, etc)
I've been developing a theory of Reddit in my mind for about the last year. It's mostly grown out of the ubiquity and monoculture of AdviceAnimals/memes, but I think it applies to most of the frontpage reddits.

Redditors have basically developed and distributed a set of rules for what they find funny/cool/interesting, and endlessly repeat these same jokes/memes. If you follow the frontpage for any reasonable amount of time, you see the same few ideas over and over. Just about everything is somehow referential to a previous post. It almost feels Pavlovian after a while. Someone will post a picture with an attractive female in it. Someone else will comment with a Gif of a bunch of hotdogs being thrown in her face. Someone else will point out that hidden amongst the hotdogs is a finger. Someone else will point out that every time an attractive girl is posted, all of these things occur. This happens over and over, countless times every day. To call it derivative would be generous, because it's a carbon copy.

Advice Animals (Image Macros with text) seemed to take this to its extreme. The same 10 images are posted thousands of times per day, with a sentence about how some event in the posters life relates to the meme. If you take away the meme, and simply tell the story by itself, its dull and boring. Attach it to the same picture you've been seeing for the last year and half, and it's got 1000 upvotes.

Most of the material on the frontpage of reddit is not interesting on it's own merits. It's only interesting in the context of the thoroughly homogeneous userbase that has been conditioned to respond to the same 15 memes.

It seems to me like an advertiser's dream demographic. A clearly delineated set of rules to engage millions of potential customers. Flip this switch, turn that knob, show this meme, reference The Big Lebowski, and Bob's your uncle.
I was reading your post, about halfway through I started thinking 'hey this reads like a post by...' glances up at username 'oh look, it actually is' skips rest of post.
Totally agree. Even the ability to respond as on we can on Google Play would be a massive improvement (or even up/down vote like on HN)
Its a rough figure I've been told - it probably depends on where you are living and the standard of construction. Every component will of course wear at a different speed and some (kitchens and bathrooms especially) sooner. Often roofs need a lot of work after 40 years or so and sometimes cheap walls too. Theres books dedicated to this kind of stuff. See the following link for some examples: http://www.thisoldhouse.com/toh/m/article/0,,216991-2,00.htm...
>I've got my 7 year badge but I don't go back anymore. I'm aged out.

...

>My small business projects rely on subreddits for customer service.

k.
It is very possible to get the traffic for CDMA devices and those devices grab GSM and CDMA alike. The issues are dealing with the newer tech.
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=grandpa%27s+photos#!/story/forever...
I'd never heard of Re/code (yes, I noticed the embarrassing spelling) until just now. reddit serves billions of pageviews a month. I'm not saying this guy's got nothing interesting to say, but it does seem a little bit condescending to say, "Can reddit grow up?" When reddit has already grown to be one of the most popular sites in the world in a quite short time.
> I assume you haven't contributed a line of code to the project, so it's a bit presumptuous to knock it.

It's not that simple. Even if you're a company that wants to use the software and contribute changes upstream, it's still a dumb idea to use AGPL software.

Because of the loose definition of what constitutes a derived work, modifying AGPL software (even if you put those modifications upstream) means you might have to open source your entire software stack. The AGPL is not like the LGPL, it doesn't contain any exceptions for linking against it in an overall product. Unless you have clear service boundaries, you are creating a derived work every time you use AGPL software in a service.

In my company, our lawyers outright forbid the use of AGPL software altogether for this reason. Even software that's only used internally. As _delirium mentioned above[1], that's not entirely an unwanted thing from the licenser's perspective: they typically do this so you'll buy their commercial license. But don't assume the only people who don't like AGPL are non-contributing freeloaders.

We submit tons of stuff upstream on a regular basis at my company, but we simply can't do it with AGPL software. Seeing any reference at all that our company (which has some of the deepest pockets in the planet) uses AGPL software anywhere in its stack will open ourselves up to lawsuits immediately. So we just don't touch it, ever.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8095024
It doesn't help that its currently July and summer reddit has always been shit.
Here's a quick dump of the code https://github.com/joshhunt/uber. It's pretty rough and it makes a lot of assumptions (e.g. metric system and AUD). I never really plan on looking at it again, so your milage may vary.
Minor typo in the left-side TOC of the docs... "devlopment" (missing an e).
I don't get why this is included in the window.Uber pingData. It seems as though your rating is something that isn't necessary and shouldn't be surfaced client-side.

Anyone have some insight into why this data is there in the first place? Is this an accidental leak, some sort of optimization or something else?
Oh that's fantastic! I'm definitely very interested in giving that a try!
That doesn't actually happen
The front page of reddit isn't really where the community shines. It represents the greatest common denominator of internet culture, which is pretty much what you described, fueled by kids. A while ago, reddit split off into sub-reddits, each with their own culture and moderators who do their best to keep up quality of posts. For example: reddit.com/r/TrueReddit
Ah my mistake. I haven't used Uber in a while but seemed to remember a screen where you can optionally increase gratuity. I guess I'm confusing it with the Square interface. Who can keep up nowadays...
If your asking if their's another service like Google voice, I'm not sure. I haven't done much more digging on text message bot integration, although you could make an irc bot which would operate on the same principle, just not through text, and not as private.
I agree with you on /r/askscience, it's probably my favorite subreddit now. Don't get me wrong - there are still sections of reddit that are designed for (and achieve) in-depth discussion. However, in general, the comments that are upvoted are usually jokes/wit and references.
That is just an IMSI catcher, the real answer is "Possibly, but not likely"
Reciprocal bad ratings from several drivers could indicate a bad passenger who is being fussy etc and trying to take it out on drivers.
There's no guarantee that it's a simple arithmetic mean. They could weight by recency or do any number of more complicated calculations.
I wonder if Lyft shares something similar via their API as well.

`curl -H "Authorization: fbAccessToken <fb access token>" https://api.lyft.com/users/<lyft user id>` provides some basic profile, credit card, location and referral information but nothing about ratings. The lyft user ID can be obtained by logging in at www.lyft.com/login and viewing the source.
I feel bad that they rate us because we don't provide them with anything.

In rough order of importance to drivers:

1) Not causing damage to their vehicles.

2) Giving good enough directions on pickup such that they waste a minimum of (unpaid) time getting to you, and exiting the car in an expeditious manner. An Uber driver's KPI is "number of minutes per day with the car in motion with a passenger in it." (This is the biggest reason why many of them keep multiple phones with multiple apps open -- minimizing time between trips maximizes the number of trips they take per day and, thus, revenue.)

3) Not contravening the usual covenants of civil society.
What tools did you use to write this game ?
I honestly think the problem isn't reddit. It's the advertisers' model that has the problem. I realize that this is nonsensical, reddit needs the cash, but hear me out.

I've been a redditor for nearly 5 years. I'm a moderator on many subs and over time i've even been given the privilege of becoming a moderater on a subreddit with over 100k users. I've been given random reddit gold on 3 occasions (a strange revenue system for letting users know you care by paying reddit to give them some minor perks for about $5), so i think i understand the site fairly accurately.

When you move away from the large subreddits, into the niche, you realize that much of reddit is actual adults, with brains, and who aren't too busy to see news, and also have a discussion about it. I've always seen this as a problem for advertisers.

Advertisers want it one way. They want to send a message, and they want that to be the only thing said.

Take this amazing ad from thai life insurance: http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/22jybg/what_does_kin...

The top comment, while jokingly so, brings up the point that this is a commercial... it's not real... it's trying to make you think a certain way on purpose. It's manipulative. Reddit breaks the 4th wall. It calls bullshit, and much of the time, it's right.

Reddit's problem is that when an ad is truly impressive, a great deal, etc., the relevant firm doesn't need to pay reddit to get attention. The users will do that for them. See dollar shave club: http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/qk7xr/dollarshaveclu...

I really don't think there is much of a solution for reddit, but if i were in charge, the way i would generate revenue would be to hold the successful ads hostage. Shadow ban advertisers accounts if they don't play ball. Literally remove viral commercials, but do it quietly. It's an abuse of the system and the users know that, and i think users like me would understand. Make them pay a fee to even attempt to "go viral."

That's my 2 cents.
> If you take away the meme, and simply tell the story by itself, its dull and boring. Attach it to the same picture you've been seeing for the last year and half, and it's got 1000 up votes.

IANA Literary Anthropologist, but: when you tell a story from your life by itself, you're presumably telling it about you. People don't care about you: they've never met you, and after they read your words they'll probably never hear from you again. They don't have any previous impressions of you to pattern match their expectations against, so nothing you say can make them go "oh, yeah, that's just like her" or "ha, I knew it" or "oh god, it's going to happen to him again, isn't it?"

In the context of an image macro, on the other hand, your story is paraphrased into a sort of shared mythology: there's this one platonic Awkward Penguin/Insanity Wolf/Scumbag Steve, doing all of these things, and acting as a larger-than-life moral symbol of the effects of doing these things in the process. People know what to expect of the character, and so people can seek out these stories when they want something with that "feeling" to it.

Presuming you were living in Ancient Greece, you'd see these same people taking various minor heroic moments from their day-to-day lives, exaggerating a bit, and turning them into stories about Hercules.

(You can do this for a living, too, creating characters from whole cloth who are larger-than-life molds to match up to various day-to-day stories. The result is called a sitcom.)
It seems like the reason his intellectual capacity stayed the same may be because the beam did not touch his frontal lobes, but passed through his midbrain all the way to the back of his head, and appears to have exited near the occipital lobe. The occipital lobe is where the visual cortex is located, which could explain why he saw a light brighter than a "thousand suns." I'd be curious to know what his visual-spatial capacity and perceptual acuity was after this accident, though as a physicist he would probably rely on these systems heavily.

Someone with a better neuroscience background might be able to confirm that this is why the beam seems to have left his personality and intellectual ability in tact. Anyone?
As of last night when I used Uber the driver photo would cycle to a picture of the car and color. Don't know if it was a one off thing or what.
AppleScript can interface with iMessage, so it's certainly possible to magic up an interface.
It makes me wonder if in the future there might be false convictions based on DNA evidence, and not from chimeras or inaccurate testing. DNA found at a crime scene has basically come to mean that person is guilty in the public mind (thanks CSI). Even though it's unlikely, it's possible to get some DNA on someone you're near in public who then gets murdered. So you've got DNA on the person, your cell phone is in the area, and you don't have a particular alibi. In most cases that probably means that person is guilty, but I can imagine a number of cases where the person could just be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

From the article it sounds like from where the DNA was located and other corraborating evidence that this guy is guilty. But I'm glad the article ended by saying some of the geneticists weren't condemning the accused based on the DNA evidence alone. I hope that type of thinking expands into the wider public.
It is several million differing opinions distilled into one aggregation. It will, of course, be the lowest denominator of commonality. And the result of that is a firm entrenchment in belief, so you get that homogeneity. It is a positive feedback loop, but it is anything but niche at this point.
Ah yes, I remember history textbooks of 19th century immigration, and pictures of signs reading 'newfags need not apply.'
Well, no. It makes more sense to think of a subreddit as a separate site that happens to share hosting with a bunch of other sites. Then it's obvious that you just have to search, follow the links, and try them out to see if they're any good.
Chrome + many tabs is the biggest power draw on my 2013 Air, followed by my Virtualbox vms.
Yeah no idea.. Im at 4.5 at the moment, am always standing on the curb for pickup and polite. I've also always ranked drivers as 5 stars. surprising
Holy text walls batman :-). Great read though, great writers in that thread and definitely learned a fair share about feudalism (though probably won't remember it for long...)
Its not just about detecting a tower, they spit out a friends list for your phone to know the different zones in the area. That list changes.
Yeah, but Beane wasn't dealt the same hand as Theo Epstein, who had 2-4X the payroll to work with. If the A's could have augmented their strategy with a couple big free agents every year, it would be a fair comparison.
My point is that no matter what you do, you will never be able to invalidate an idea. All you can ever do is invalidate one exact execution of the idea. Perhaps your idea is great but you left out the one killer feature. Or perhaps it's feature perfect but the design is just not right. Or perhaps the implementation is perfect but you didn't market it correctly. Research done prior to launch can certainly be helpful but still doesn't change the fact that you cannot invalidate an idea.

The problem I have with the lean startup movement is how easily it is to get derailed before you ever even begin. For example, the lean startup movement suggests an initial qualitative approach to testing your assumptions, achieved by talking to a small number of people in your target market. But that assumes you know who your target market will be, that you know who the early adopters in that market will be, and that you're asking the right questions. If you get any of those wrong, poof! You'll believe your assumption wrong and your idea invalidated even those it hasn't been.

The founders of Jarvis may have done their homework prior to releasing a product. They may have concluded that there was a real pain point that their service could solve. But what research should they have done to realize that their target market wouldn't be interested unless they had a legal page? Or demonstrations? The problem with trying to go with the absolute MVP is that it's way too easy to go too minimal.

The lean startup methodology will work best for ideas that solve massive pain points. With a massive pain point, it won't matter if you're talking to someone that is normally an early adopter or someone that normally trails behind. It won't matter if you have a poor design, a minimal feature set, and no legal page. But for anything else, it's just entirely too easy for your target market to dismiss you and for you to summarily dismiss your idea.
I'm Quentin's co-creator on Hexiled. If you're interested, we had a woefully unsuccessful Show HN the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8088223

And note that at the end of Quentin's blog entry, there's a link to our blog series about creating the game. We've been talking to friends about the general aspects of the game so always keen to chat with other game developers and entrepreneurs about specific challenges.
It's all written using SpriteKit.

We didn't like the standard Game Center pop-in notifications, so we designed our own - these use normal UIViews, and we use the built-in Twitter/Facebook sharing view controllers.

The loading spinners, alerts / dialogs are all in SpriteKit. I'm not sure if this is optimal (I believe other developers lean on UIKit a bit more), but it all fits together nicely this way.
Can you talk more about the extortion?

Given that Uber apparently drops drivers that get below a 4.5 or something, I wouldn't expect much trouble from them...
Yes, not without permission
But that leads directly to a war of countermeasures as advertisers try to not get their content classified as advertisement. It's a rather blurry line, and regular users will get caught up in a system like that.
I think there is a down/up vote mechanism in iTunes ("Was this review helpful? Yes/No"). But I'm not sure if that's visible on actual devices.